GONERBY HILL by climbing the famous Gonerby Hill, the terror and effectual trial ground of motors in their earliest days, and described by "mine host" in The Heart of Midlothian as "a murder to post-horses." The hill once gained affords a fine view eastwards, Foston and Long Bennington (which has a large church with a handsome porch, a good churchyard cross, and a mutilated market cross), are the only villages, till the road crosses the county boundary near Claypole, and runs on about four miles to Newark, distant fifteen miles from Grantham. Long Bennington is a mile north-east of Normanton Lodge, where Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire touch.
Stubton, a couple of miles to the east, has a fine group of yew trees growing round the tomb of Sir George Heron, one of the family from Cressy Hall, Gosberton, I suppose, who built the hall now occupied by G. Neville, Esq.
Between Stubton and the Grantham-and-Lincoln road are many winding lanes, by a judicious use of which you may escape the fate that overtook us of landing after a steep and rather rough climb from Barkstone at two farms one after the other, beyond which the road did not even try to go. If you have better luck you will reach the out-of-the-way parish church of Hough-on-the-Hill.
This, the last resting-place of King John, when on his journey to Newark where he died, has a church whose tower is singularly interesting, being akin to St. Peter's at Barton-on Humber, and the two very old churches in Lincoln, and one at Broughton, near Brigg, and we may add, perhaps, the tower at Great Hale.
The work of all these towers is pre-Norman, and it is not unlikely that the church, when first built, consisted of only a tower and two apses. At Hough, as at Broughton, we have attached to the west face of the tower a Saxon circular turret staircase, built in the rudest way and coped with a sloping top of squared masonry, of apparently Norman work. The tower has several very small lights, 12 to 15 inches high, and of various shapes, while the west side of the south porch is pierced with a light which only measures 8 inches by 4, but is framed with dressed stone on both the wall-surfaces. The two lower stages of the square tower, to whose west face the round staircase-tower clings, are all of the same rough stone-work, with wide mortar joints, but with two square edged thick string-courses of dressed stone, projecting 6 inches or more. The upper
