OLD FOSDYKE BRIDGE
To finish our day and get into "the parts of Lindsey," we
take the north road from Holbeach over Fosdyke bridge to
Boston. In the church at Fosdyke we may see a remarkable
font with a tall Perpendicular oak cover similar, but not equal
in beauty, to that at Frieston.
Before 1814, people who wished to go from Boston into the eastern half of Holland and on to Cambridge and Norfolk had to cross the Welland estuary by ferry or go round by Spalding, but in 1811 an Act was passed for erecting a bridge at Fosdyke Wash and making a causeway to it over the sands. The work was designed by Rennie, who had an excellent patron in Sir Joseph Banks. The account of it, written at the time, is curious. The bridge was 300 feet long and had eight openings, the three in mid-stream being thirty feet wide, and the centre one opened with two leaves, which, having a counterpoise, were easily moved from a horizontal to a perpendicular position by means of a large rack-wheel and pinion wound by a common hand-winch. The nine piers were each made of oak trees driven in whole in clusters of six. These trees were none of them less than thirty feet long and eighteen inches in diameter, rather larger than the beams used to carry the floors in Tattershall Castle.[1] Those in the four central piers were enormous, being forty-two feet long and nineteen inches in diameter. They were driven in twenty to twenty-two feet below the bottom of the river and bolted together with timbers a foot thick. All was carried out in oak, the roadway planks being three inches thick. I went to see this stout old timber bridge and was disgusted to find that a grey-painted iron structure had taken its place.
From Fosdyke the road passes Algarkirk and strikes the Spalding and Boston main road at Sutterton, where it turns north to Kirton. After passing Kirton—the magnificent church of which place was so strangely altered and mutilated by a ruthless architect called Hayward, in 1804, who pulled down its noble central tower and its double-aisled transept and built of the old materials a handsome but new tower at the west end—we soon see on the right, first Frampton and then Wyberton, the latter only about a mile south of Boston.
- ↑ These were cut in Nottinghamshire; but I see that Sussex is to supply the oak for the roof timbers of Westminster Hall.
