FULBECK AND LEADENHAM buttresses outside with figures of the Annunciation and the Coronation of the Virgin, and one of our Lord on the porch. The windows are large. The spire is lofty but unpleasing, as it has a marked "entasis" or set in, such as is seen in many Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire spires, which hence are often termed sugar-loafed. Before its re-building, in 1859, after it had been struck by lightning, the entasis was still more marked than it is now. The singularly thin, ugly needle-like spire of Glinton, just over the southern border of the county near Deeping, has a slight set in which does not improve its appearance. A mile to the north the road passes through the very pretty village of Fulbeck. The dip of the road, the charming old houses, grey and red, the handsome church tower with its picturesque pinnacles, and the ancestral beauty of the fine trees, make a really lovely picture. Fine iron gates lead to the Hall, the home of the Fanes, an honoured name in Lincolnshire. Many of the name rest in the churchyard, and their monuments fill the dark church, which has a good Norman font. The tampering with old walls and old buildings is always productive of mischief, and, as at Bath Abbey, when, to add to its appearance, flying buttresses were put up all along the nave, the weight began to crush in the nave walls, and the only remedy was to put on, at great expense, a stone groined roof, which is the real raison d'être of flying buttresses, so here at Fulbeck, when they pulled down the chancel and built it up again with the walls further out, the consequence was that the east wall of the nave, missing its accustomed support, began to lean out eastwards.
Another mile and a half brings us to Leadenham, where the east and west road from Sleaford to Newark crosses the Great North road. The fine tall spire is seen from all the country round, for it stands half way up the cliff. But this and the rest of the road to Lincoln is described in Chapter XIII.
If you go out of Grantham by the south-west, you should stop at a very pretty little village to the south of the Grantham and Melton road, from which a loop descends to an old gateway, all that is left of the old Harlaxton Manor, a pretty Tudor building now pulled down, the stone balustrades in front of it having been removed by Mr. Pearson Gregory to his large house a mile off, built on the ridge of the park by Salvin in 1845. The Flemish family of De Ligne lived in the old Hall in Jacobean
