this encounter are now sadly to seek, and Sir Ralph Wharton himself lives only in Thoresby’s diary. Thoresby was a very inaccurate person. He mentions “Stonegate Hole, between Stamford and Grantham,” but he is out of his reckoning by forty miles or so, Ogilby’s map of 1697 marking the spot near Sawtry. Accordingly when we find him, going by coach, instead of by his usual method, on horseback, in May 1714, and noting “we dined at Grantham: had the usual solemnity (this being the first time the coach passed in May), the coachman and horses being decked with ribbons and flowers, the town music and young people in couples before us,” we shrewdly suspect he was referring to the festivities of this kind held at Sutton-on-Trent, twenty-three miles further north. Witham Common passed, we come to the village of Colsterworth, built on a rise, with fine views from it of the upland copses and gentle hills and dales of this hunting country, where the Cottesmore, the Atherstone, and the Quorn overrun one another’s boundaries. Colsterworth is the last of the stone-built villages for many a mile to come, red brick reigning from Grantham onwards, to far beyond York. It is a narrow-streeted village, with an old church, closely elbowed by houses beside the road; the church where Sir Isaac Newton and his ancestors worshipped, and where, on the wall of the Newton Chapel, may yet be seen one of the sundials he carved with a penknife when only nine years of age. In a secluded nook, nearly two miles to the left of the highroad, lies Woolsthorpe Manor House, the Newtons’ ancestral home, now a small farmhouse, with a tablet built into the wall of the room where the philosopher was born. The famous apple-tree whose falling fruit suggested the Law of Gravitation has long since disappeared. Lincolnshire now begins to thoroughly belie its reputation for flatness, the road descending steeply from Colsterworth and rising sharply from Easton Park to the park of Stoke Rochford, with another long sharp descent beyond, and a further rise of some importance into Great Ponton, another of the very small “Great” villages. [Picture: Great Ponton]