The river Witham, which the visitor to Woodhall Spa sees skirting the railway, has passed through more than one metamorphosis. Now confined by banks, which have been alternately renewed and broken down at different periods, before the drainage of the Fens, it spread over all that level tract of country, meandering by its many islands and through its oozy channels and meres, the resort of countless flocks of wild fowl and fish _ad infinitum_, but preserving still one main navigable artery, by which vessels of considerable tonnage could slowly sail to Lincoln. Acts were passed, in the reigns of Edward the Third. Richard the Second, Henry the Seventh, Queen Elizabeth, and the two Charleses; and Commissioners were again and again appointed to effect the embanking and draining of these watery wastes, but with only temporary success; and it was not till 1787, or 1788, that the present complete system of drainage was commenced, which is now permanently established. {101a} And in these days, the Fens, once consisting as much of water as of land, at times even suffer from a scarcity of that commodity; drains, which within the writer’s own recollection abounded with fish, being now often dry almost all the year round. At a much more remote period the Witham was probably a much stronger river, and largely conduced to altering the features of the county. This subject has been carefully investigated by our geologists, {101b} with the result that certain changes in the strata of the upper Witham valley, from its source near Grantham, and changes also in the lower valley of the Trent, go far to prove that the Trent, instead of, as it does now, flowing into the Humber, took a more easterly course, and joining forces with the Witham some miles above Lincoln, the united streams pushed their way through the gorge, or “break” in the cliff formation, which occurs there, and is technically known as “The Lincoln Gap,” and continued their course to the sea by something like the present channel of the Witham. The idea of this “Lincoln Gap,” though the term is not actually used, would seem to have originated with Mr. W. Bedford, who stated, in a paper already mentioned, read before “The Lincolnshire Topographical Society,” in 1841, that “the great breach below Lincoln could only be accounted for by the mighty force of agitated waters dashing against the rocks, through long ages”. (Printed by W. and B. Brookes, Lincoln, 1843, p. 24, &c.) The theory would seem to be now generally accepted. Thus: “that ancient river, the river” Witham, honoured, we believe, by the Druid as his sacred stream, {102} consecrated in a later age to the Christian, by the number of religious houses erected on its shores, through a yet earlier stage of its existence performed the laborious task of carving out the vale of Grantham, and so adding to the varied beauty of our county; then, by a kind of metempsychosis of the river spirit, it was absorbed in the body