yawning gap between the slope and the gang-plank by putting a piece of board of some kind, but with no fit, to prevent the wheel from dropping through or the car going headlong into the sea, the machine is got on to the deck; and then all sorts of heavy goods on hand-barrows are brought on, four men having to hang on to each down the slippery planks, and these are piled all round the motor, and all are taken off on the other side with incredible exertions before the motor has a chance to move. The crossing itself takes but twenty minutes, but the whole process of getting on, crossing and getting off, occupied us two hours, and a really big car would never have been able to get over at all. No one at the Hull Corporation pier seems to know anything about the use of a crane for loading purposes, and it is evident that passenger traffic with any form of vehicle is not to receive any encouragement from this anything but up-to-date railway company. Why do not the Hull Corporation insist on something very much better? The parallelogram between the railway and Humber, when it turns south opposite Hull, has a belt of marsh along the river side, and because it was in old times so inaccessible, it contains some fine monastic buildings. [Illustration: _Great Goxhill Priory._] [Sidenote: GOXHILL] [Sidenote: THORNTON ABBEY] Two miles west of Barrow is _Goxhill_. Here there is a fine church tower, with a delicate parapet, and a mile south is the so-called “Priory,” which was probably only a memorial chapel served by a hermit in the pay of the De Spenser family. Murray gives this entry from the bishop’s registers for 1368: “Thomas De Tykhill, hermit, clerk, presented by Philip Despenser to the chapel of St. Andrew in the parish of Goxhill, on the death of Thomas, the last hermit.” It is now a picturesque ruin of two stories, the lower one vaulted and with three large Decorated windows at the sides, and a large double round-headed one at the end, all now blocked, the building being used for a barn. Two miles from this, and near Thornton Abbey Station, is all that is left of _Thornton Abbey_. A fine gateway, second only to that at Battle Abbey, and two sides of a beautiful octagonal chapter-house, with very rich arcading beneath the lovely three-light windows. Founded in 1139, for a prior and twelve Augustinian canons, it became an abbey in 1149, and in 1517 a “mitred” abbey, the only one in the county except Croyland. And these two are now the most notable of all the monastic remains in Lincolnshire. One of its abbots was said to have been walled up alive, and Bishop Tanner, in his MS. account of the abbey, now in the Bodleian, says of Abbot Walter Multon, 1443: “He died, but by what death I know not. He hath no obit, as other Abbots have, and the place of his burial hath not been found,” and Stukeley, 1687-1765, says that on taking down a wall in his time a skeleton was found in a sitting posture, with a table and a lamp, but I