A DESCRIPTION OF THE AREA COVERED

The Car Dyke	Bourne is an historic market town looking eastward to the flat and fertile fens and westward to the wooded uplands and it has a remarkable place in history. The Romans built a road known as King Street through here on its way to Sleaford and the Car Dyke, one of their great construction feats  to carry food and supplies to their advancing armies. The town began as a cluster of dwellings on the Car Dyke and subsequently became a Roman station, a Saxon stronghold and the site of a Norman abbey and castle, no mean achievements in the long pageant of British history.
The Abbey Church	Robert Manning, the man who gave our English language its present shape, spent long years as a teacher and translator at the abbey and legend perpetuated by the 19th century novelist Charles Kingsley suggests that Hereward the Wake lived here while William Cecil, who became Lord Burghley, the great statesman of Queen Elizabeth I, was born in the house that is now the Burghley Arms in the town centre. Bourne Abbey, dedicated to St Peter and St Paul, was founded by the Lord of the Manor, Baldwin Fitzgilbert, in the 12th century and dates from circa 1138.
Baldock's Mill	Few buildings, however, predate the 1600s as two fires in the 17th century devastated the town. But it still has a lot of old and interesting architecture while the surrounding villages have a rural charm that is typical of South Lincolnshire. It is a rewarding pastime for anyone with time to spare, to stop and stare, to turn off the main highways and see for themselves, for they will find mills and manors, churches and coaching inns, old cottages and houses, dykes and rivers bordered by ancient woodlands. For this area is the nearest you will get to finding an unwrecked England.