Just beyond Casterton, coyly hiding down a lane to the left, is the little village of Tickencote, preserving in its name some prehistoric goat-farm, “Tyccen-cote” meaning in the Anglo-Saxon nothing more nor less than “goat’s-home.” Of more tangible interest is the splendid Norman church, of small size but extraordinary elaboration; a darkling building with heavy chancel arch covered with those zigzags, lozenges, birds’ heads, and tooth-mouldings so beloved by Norman architects, and with a “Norman” nave built in 1792 to replace that portion of the building destroyed many years before. The pseudo-Norman work of our own day is, almost without exception, vile, and that of the eighteenth century was worse, but here is an example of such faithful copying of existing portions that now, since a hundred years and more have passed and the first freshness of the new masonry gone, it is difficult to distinguish the really old work from the copy. [Picture: The “Highflyer,” 1840 (After Forrest)] Returning to the highroad, a further two miles bring us to Horn Lane, the site of a vanished turnpike gate, and to the coppices and roadside trees of Bloody Oaks, where the battle of Empingham was fought, March 13, 1470, between the forces of Edward the Fourth and the hastily assembled Lincolnshire levies of Sir Robert Welles and Sir Thomas de la Launde, fighting, _not_ for the Lancastrian cause, as so often stated, but in an insurrection fomented by the Earl of Warwick, whose object was to raise Edward’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, to the throne. It was a massacre, rather than a battle, for Edward’s army was both more numerous and better equipped, and the rebels soon broke and fled. Flinging away their weapons, and even portions of their clothing, as they went, the fight was readily named “Losecoat Field.” The captured leaders paid for their ineffectual treason with their blood, for they were executed at Stamford. [Picture: Bloody Oaks] The country folks have quite forgotten Losecoat Field, and think the woodlands of Bloody Oaks were so named from the execution of John Bowland, a highwayman who was gibbeted at Empingham Corner in 1769.