Of the eight roads which run to Stamford, the Great North Road which here coincides with the Roman Ermine Street is the chief; and this enters from the south through Northamptonshire and goes out by the street called “Scotgate” in a north-westerly direction through Rutland. It leaves Lincolnshire at Great or Bridge Casterton on the river Gwash; one mile further it passes the celebrated church of Tickencote nestling in a hollow to the left, where the wonderful Norman chancel arch of five orders outdoes even the work at Iffley near Oxford, and the wooden effigy of a knight reminds one of that of Robert Duke of Normandy at Gloucester. _Tickencote_ is the home of the Wingfields, and the villagers in 1471 were near enough to hear “the Shouts of war” when the Lincolnshire Lancastrians fled from the fight on Loosecoat Field after a slaughter which is commemorated on the map by the name “Bloody Oaks.” Further on, the road passes Stretton, ‘the village on the street,’ whence a lane to the right takes you to the famed Clipsham quarries just on the Rutland side of the boundary, and over it to the beautiful residence of Colonel Birch Reynardson at _Holywell_. Very soon now the Ermine Street, after doing its ten miles in Rutland, passes by “Morkery Wood” back into Lincolnshire. The only Stamford Road which is all the time in our county is the eastern road through Market Deeping to Spalding, this soon after leaving Stamford passes near Uffington Hall, built in 1688 by Robert Bertie, son of Montague, second Earl of Lindsey, he whose father fell at Edgehill. On the northern outskirt of the parish Lord Kesteven has a fine Elizabethan house called Casewick Hall. Round each house is a well-timbered park, and at Uffington Hall the approach is by a fine avenue of limes. At _Tallington_, where the road crosses the Great Northern line, the church, like several in the neighbourhood, has some Saxon as well as Norman work, and the original Sanctus bell still hangs in a cot surmounting the east end of the nave. It is dedicated to St. Lawrence. South Lincolnshire seems to have been rather rich in Saxon churches, and two of the best existing towers of that period at Barnack and Wittering in Northamptonshire are within three miles of Stamford, one on either side of the Great North Road. _Barholm_ Church, near Tallington, has some extremely massive Norman arches and a fine door with diapered tympanum. The tower was restored in the last year of Charles I., and no one seems to have been more surprised than the churchwarden or parson or mason of the time, for we find carved on it these lines:— “Was ever such a thing Sence the creation? A new steeple built In the time of vexation. I. H. 1643.” [Sidenote: FORDS OF THE WELLAND]