A Week on the Estate: Organic September, Church Festival & Harvest Season

Speaking of home-grown goodness, both the Walled Garden and the hedgerows are yielding a fine crop. Paul Barnes photographed one of the many fruiting hedgerows that will help sustain our bird population alongside our wild-bird food plots as winter approaches. Closer to home, we snapped a picture of the Walled Garden produce we’ll be turning into soup for visitors to The Old School Tea & Coffee Shop. Don’t forget to pre-book your free food and drink – fresh, wholesome and with our compliments – when you visit the estate to try out our walking trails.

If you’re looking for a fine early-autumn day-out, the Lincolnshire Wolds & Coast Churches Festival gets underway this weekend. After a challenging 18 months of Covid restrictions, 130 of our region’s churches and chapels are opening their doors over the first two weekends of September and will be offering a warm welcome to visitors.

Some of our region’s churches are small, simple and secluded, while other are grander and central to our market towns. They all have stories to tell and treasures they love to show off. The first weekend – 4^th and 5^th September – will focus on seaside churches around Skegness, Sutton-on-Sea and Chapel-St-Leonards. The second weekend – 11^th and 12^th September – will move inland to the heart of the Wolds, taking in our very own St Leonard’s at South Ormsby as well as churches at Snelland, Horncastle, Spilsby and beyond.

History abounds at South Ormsby Estate, not least in the part it played in the birth of Methodism. The long vanished original rectory lay to the north of St Leonard’s Church. Now given over to pasture, you’ll pass this site on several of our walking trails including the Wesley Walk. This austere building was famously condemned as ‘a mean cot’ by an early resident, Samuel Wesley (1662-1735), the father of the founders of Methodism, John and Charles Wesley. In 1849, the Reverend Francis Charles Massingberd commissioned a far grander new rectory – now known as The Old Rectory –  which lies further to the south on Ormsby Ring.

You may recall that a dozen volunteers answered the call to give St Leonard’s a thorough spruce-up in mid-August. Thanks again to all who helped make this charming local church spick and span for its re-opening. To find out more about the Lincolnshire Wolds & Coast Churches Festival, click HERE.

Finally, Chapter Three of ‘Granny’s at Brinkhill’ is HERE. This week, Cecile remembers her patient Uncle Jack, a strapping gamekeeper who preferred his pheasants to people: “He was lean and sinewy with strikingly red curly hair. He could have been a body double for Bjorn Borg. [His] ancestry quite possibly went back to the Celts in the area who…. first trod the Bluestone Heath roadway long before the Romans arrived.”

If this series is bringing back some memories, we’d love to hear from you. Just drop us a line via our Facebook page. If you’ve missed any part of ‘My Days’ or ‘Our Days’, you can find everything HERE.

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* Grass image courtesy of LH_4tography via Flickr CC