To those who visit Woodhall Spa, in its present advanced and advancing condition, it must be difficult to conceive the very different condition of the locality even in the middle of the 19th century. If the Victorian era has been a period of remarkable progress, nowhere has it been more so than at Woodhall Spa. The place was, in those days, only accessible with great difficulty. The roads, scarcely indeed worthy of the name, were so bad that the writer well remembers going there, as a boy, with his father, for the first time, when the ruts were so deep that the pony carriage, a four-wheeled vehicle, broke in the middle, and had to be abandoned by the roadside, and they had to return home to Langton, distant about five miles, on foot. The road (now the Horncastle-road, and in excellent condition) passed, for a mile or more, over a tract of sandy moorland, and when the ruts became too deep for traffic on one track, another was adopted, and that, in turn, was abandoned when it became impassable. It was indeed a veritable Sahara on a small scale. The road to Tattershall was fairly good, having probably been an old Roman highway. {11a} Such roads are locally called “rampers,” i.e., ramparts. The road to “Kirkstead Wharf,” or ferry, where now a fine bridge spans the river Witham, was also in fairly good condition. {11b} The road which now runs from St. Andrew’s Church by the blacksmith’s shop and Reed’s Beck to Old Woodhall and Langton was just passable with difficulty. A small steam packet plied on the river Witham, between Boston and Lincoln, calling at Kirkstead twice a day, going and returning, and a carrier’s cart from Horncastle struggled through the sand once a day, each way, in connection with it. {11c} The condition of the road remained but little altered till shortly before the opening of the “loop line” of railway between Boston and Lincoln in 1848. In preparation for this event the Horncastle-road was put into a fairly good state of repair. In connection with the railway two rival coaches were run from the Bull and George Hotels at Horncastle, calling at Woodhall Spa, en route to Kirkstead Station. As yet, however, the traffic was lacking to make the enterprise remunerative. The brace of coaches were then merged in one, but, for the same reason, that arrangement was presently abandoned, and for some years there remained only the carrier’s cart, slightly accelerated in speed, and even that was sometimes precarious in its journeys. The writer has found it necessary, on arriving at Kirkstead Station on a dark night, to shoulder his own portmanteau and carry it himself, for lack of other means of transport, from Kirkstead to Langton, a distance of six miles. {12} At length, in 1855, the line between Kirkstead and Horncastle, with a station at Woodhall Spa, was opened, which has proved to be one of the most paying amongst railway ventures in the kingdom, and has opened up communication