Coningsby

The One-Handed Clock

The clock on St Michael's tower has one hand. Its face is sixteen and a half feet across, painted straight onto the east wall of the tower, and the single hand is nearly nine feet long. It was built in the seventeenth century, when one-handed clocks were common, and it is now probably the largest of its type still working anywhere. The face is marked in quarter-hours with a red diamond at each half, so you can read the time to within a few minutes if you stand still and concentrate. A thirteen-foot pendulum swings once every two seconds, the driving weights are large stones, and until the war a man was paid £2 a year to climb the thirty-five steps and wind it once a day. Peter Bass wound it for over twenty years. His father wound it for twenty years before him.

The tower itself stands apart from the body of the church, with an archway underneath that a footpath still runs through. You can walk beneath a Grade I building on your way to somewhere else.

Three Very Different Pubs

For a pub with food, the White Bull on the High Street is the one people rate — steak and kidney pie, fish and chips, a French dip baguette, lasagne, and a pork dinner that one reviewer called the best they'd eaten out in a long time. The Leagate Inn, out on the B1192 at the edge of the village, is older: 1542, and reckoned the oldest continually licensed premises in Lincolnshire. It was the last of the Fen Guide Houses, built to steer travellers across the undrained marshes before the fens were dry, and the bracket for its signal torch is still on the east gable. Inside there's an inglenook, ancient oak beams, and a priest's hole above the fireplace. Out front is Gibbet Nook Close, where the gallows once stood; plaques in the fireplaces mark the last meals of the condemned. The evening menu runs to lamb tagine and steak and kidney pie. The Black Swan on the High Street doesn't do food but has a garden where children can play and a free car park to the side.

Across the River Bain

The village sits on the River Bain, with Tattershall and its enormous red-brick castle keep on the far bank. Walks link the two across the water, past Tattershall Lakes and along the river to Dogdyke, where the Bain meets the Witham and there's a pub at the end of it. Paths are often muddy.

RAF Coningsby and the Memorial Flight

Half a mile south is RAF Coningsby, still operational, still loud. The Dambusters were briefly based here; the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight has been since 1957, and you can tour the hangar and stand next to the Lancaster and the Spitfires. On 19 July 2022 the station recorded 40.3°C, at the time the hottest it had ever been in Britain.

The Monkey on the Roof

There is a stone monkey carved on the church porch roof. In 1732 the infant heir to the Coningsby title was carried onto a roof by a pet monkey and dropped, which ended the earldom. Someone thought this worth commemorating in stone, and they were right.