Littleborough

The Roman Crossing and a Tiny Hamlet

At low water in a dry summer, you can still make out the Roman ford: a paved crossing about eighteen feet wide, once staked with oak piles on either bank, carrying the road from Lincoln to Doncaster over the Trent. The ford itself was removed in 1820, but a solid stretch of paving survives on the Littleborough side, and locals ploughing the fields above it used to turn up Roman coins they called "Swines-penies."

There is no pub in Littleborough, and no shop. It is a scatter of farms and a redundant church on the flat west bank of the river, and if you want a pint or a loaf of bread you go two miles to Sturton le Steeple, the parish that absorbed Littleborough in 1935, or six miles to Gainsborough across the water in Lincolnshire.

River Quiet and St Nicholas' Church

What Littleborough has instead is the river and the quiet. Dr William Stukeley, visiting in 1722, called it "a small village three miles above Gainsborough just upon the edge of the water," which is still accurate. The land stays flat and open in every direction, Lincolnshire visible across the water.

St Nicholas' Church is one of the smallest parish churches in the country: a chancel barely thirteen feet long, a nave of twenty-four. It was probably built in the second half of the eleventh century, using two reused Saxon pillars in the chancel arch and rubble walling that incorporates Roman brick and tile, laid in places in herringbone pattern. There's a Norman doorway and a font with a seventeenth-century bowl under an eighteenth-century domed cover. The double bellcote on the west gable holds two bells: Sancta Maria, cast around 1180 and reckoned the oldest bell in Nottinghamshire, and Ave Maria, from 1350. The church stopped holding regular services in 1993 and now belongs to the Churches Conservation Trust.

Litelburg and Segelocum

The Domesday survey recorded the place as Litelburg: two villagers, fourteen freemen and four smallholders, one ploughland worked by five men's plough teams, and a value to the lord of ten shillings.

Before Domesday, this was Segelocum, a Roman town of some forty acres where the road from Lindum crossed the Trent, occupied continuously from the first century and productive enough in finds that a Roman stone coffin dug up here in 1860 now sits in the cloisters of Lincoln Cathedral. A milestone found in Lincoln in 1879 gives the distance from Lindum to Segelocum as fourteen miles, which checks out.

The Lost Ferry and Riverside Walks

A chain ferry ran the crossing from around 1820 until 1905, when it was abandoned after a barge ran into it; the Foljambe family, who controlled the crossing, had restricted its use in the 1890s, and nobody thought a replacement worth rebuilding after. There's no station — Sturton's own closed to passengers in 1959 — so the nearest trains run from Retford, eight miles off, or Gainsborough, six.

For walking, the Trent Valley Way passes close by along the riverbank, and a signed 2.9-mile loop runs from Marton on the Lincolnshire side, past St Margaret's Church, to the site of the Roman crossing and back.

A Place the Roman Road Remembers

Littleborough hasn't had its own parish since 1935, when it was folded into Sturton le Steeple and stopped, officially, being anywhere at all. The Roman road doesn't seem to have noticed.