The four roads from Spilsby go north to Louth, and south to Boston, each sixteen miles; east to Wainfleet, eight miles; and west to Horncastle, ten miles. The Wainfleet one we have already described and two-thirds of that from Louth. The remaining third, starting from Spilsby, only goes through two villages—Partney and Dalby. _Partney_ lies low in the valley of Tennyson’s “Cold rivulet,” and those who have driven across the flat meadows between the village and the mill after sundown know how piercingly cold it always seems. The place has a very long history. Bede, who died in 725, writing twelve hundred years ago and speaking of the Christianising of Northumbria by Paulinus, who was consecrated Bishop of York in 625, and his visit to the province of Lindissi, _i.e._, “the parts of Lindsey” and Lincoln in particular, says that the Abbot of Peartaney (= Partney, near Spilsby, which was a cell of Bardney) spoke to him once of a man called Deda, who was afterwards, in 730, Abbot of Bardney and a very truthful man, “presbyter veracissimus,” and said that Deda told him that he had talked with an aged man who had been baptised by Bishop Paulinus in the presence of King Ædwin, in the middle of the day, and with him a multitude of people, in the River Treenta, near a city called in the language of the Angles, Tiovulfingaceaster; this was in 627. Many have taken the place to be Torksey, though that in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle is Turcesig. Green suggested it was at the ford of Farndon beyond Newark, but it was far more likely to be at Littleborough Ferry, two miles north of Torksey, where the Roman road (“Till bridge Lane”) from Lincoln crossed the river. But certainly Torksey is the nearest point of the river to Lincoln, and the Fossdyke went to it, as well as a road, so that communication was easy and inexpensive, and on the whole I should be inclined to say that Torksey was the place of baptism. [Sidenote: PARTNEY]