Tetney, Lincolnshire

THE village of Tetney is healthily and pleasantly situated about 7 miles S.S.E. of Grimsby, and 1 miles east of Holton-le-Clay Station, on the branch line of the G.N.R. between Grimsby and Louth. The parish comprises 5,030 acres of fertile land running down to the sea within the estuary of the Humber, and includes the hamlet of Tetney Lock, where the Louth Navigation joins the Humber. The village consists of a central part, near the Church; an extension eastward, known as The Hoop; and a more considerable extension towards the north, designated The North End.

Its houses are nearly all modern, its roads wide and well kept, and its fields well drained and cultivated. In these and many other respects Tetney of the present day offers a striking contrast to what it was 150 years ago. Then its roads were miry clay lanes, almost impassable for man or beast in winter; its fields were open-the plough lands divided into narrow strips of an acre or half an acre each, some less, and parcelled out, not in adjoining strips, but one here and another there all over the extensive open space known as the East and West Fields; while their beasts and sheep fed, mixed together, on open commons or pastures. The lands were undrained, and in many parts swamps. I have heard it said that people could go from Tetney to North Cotes in a boat.

A stranger walking about the village can hardly fail to notice large blue boulders placed at the corners of the roads

and in some of the farm-yards; and he can hardly avoid asking himself how these pieces of rock came into this flat district, where there are no rocks at all save the white limestone of the Wolds, some 6 miles away. The question is a fair one; but it carries us back to a far off time, when the whole district was buried deep in ice and snow, like the Arctic regions in the present day. This vast sheet of ice was constantly moving. Borne by its own weight, a part of it slipped down from the mountains of Cumberland, across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire towards the North Sea, bringing with it the very boulders of which we are speaking, and which, of course, fell to the ground or into the sea as the ice melted or broke up. These boulders were much used afterwards to mark the boundaries of fields, parishes, &c., till the enclosure of the open fields. At that time the sea probably reached to the Wolds. Tetney, therefore, was under water; but as the sea receded, and more land appeared, the higher parts of our parish-those extending from the road to the North End Grange and onwards, and reaching westward to the valley between the parishes of Tetney and Holton-le-Clay-appeared as a small island with the sea on all sides. Most probably this circumstance gave the parish its name, for when this high ground began to be inhabited by the Britons it would naturally, with the habitations erected upon it, be designated "The Homestead," or, in their language, "Tyddyn." This word was slightly varied in different localities. In our part of the country it became " Tetten," to which the Saxons added EY to denote its island character-thus Tetten became Tetteney, or Totteney, a form of spelling which it long retained. Eventually it was abbreviated to Tetney.

The gradual retirement of the sea during many, many years, has destroyed its island character, and extended the parish to its present limits eastward.

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Tetney, Lincolnshire: A History