St Guthlac's proud tower looks south down Church Street - towards the Market Place and the stone bridge over the river Welland. This is the very southern edge of Lincolnshire. The street is broad with wide grass verges, and is lined with mostly stone, mostly 18th century, houses. None are particularly outstanding but all contribute to a satisfying whole - think orchestral players not soloists. It is all very pleasant, having a quality that is somewhere between the villagey and the urban. However Deeping still suffers visually from the period when the A15 thundered through. In fact, like Bourne just a few miles north, Market Deeping feels as though it is place to pass through rather than a destination, which, I think, is a shame. In the same manner Deeping suffers from Lincolnshire's great and abiding sin of utilitarianism. It looks timeless but has suffered a lot from Modernity: in the late 19th/early 20th century The Old Wake Hall, a medieval manor house just north of the church was demolished; in WWII the village pond was filled in; Halfleet that leads north from the church has been badly filled-in with suburban housing.
The Market Place - roughly triangular, runs E-W parallel with the river, and is lined with grander buildings, some of them quite urban in scale. The rather charming Town Hall is by Thomas Pilkington of Bourne and dates from 1835; the alms houses in Church Street are by Edward Browning (we've encountered him before) and date from 1877.
Yesterday, the Feast of the Epiphany, I braved the cold and the damp to visit the small market town of Market Deeping and the parish church of St Guthlac. It was my first look inside. It is a small, low slung building; the nave (Early English arcades and Perp clerestory) darkened with late Victorian and early 20th century stained & painted glass. The chancel in contrast is light filled, where the best glass is to be found in two of the south windows. The walls of both nave and chancel have been scraped down to the bare stone, probably when the church underwent restoration in 1872 under the stern hand of James Fowler of Louth who we have encountered before at Gunby. The Wake chapel on the north of the chancel is now the organ loft. Perhaps then, a bit of a disappointment. Exterior is however graced by a strong Late Medieval west tower, which with its crisp ashlar stands in immaculate contrast to the humble rubble built walls of the rest of the church. I suspect that the tower was built under the patronage of that remarkable woman Lady Margaret Beaufort, Lady of the Deepings, mother of Henry VII, grandmother of Henry VIII and descendant of the Wakes. There is, on the s face, a Tudor portcullis.
The porch contains a really quite beautiful set of nineteenth cast iron gates by Colemans, the local iron founders, and the churchyard gates too are quite fine, though not quite so nice.
