Skellingthorpe Decoy

Village sign for Skellingthorpe showing its past decoy.

SKELLINGTHORPE - is a scattered but well built and pleasant village, near Hykeham Station, 4 miles West of Lincoln and its parish contains 584 souls and having several extensive plantations and fertile and well drained marshes. Two small steam engines have been erected near the Decoy Farm, to pump off the water in time of floods. The farms are highly cultivated and they have generally excellent houses and outbuildings. The large reservoir which supplies Lincoln Water Works is in this parish. The manor, with a large estate here, was bequeathed in 1763 by Henry Strone Esq. to Christs Hospital, London, including the Farm called Decoy, Lounds and Stone's Place.

Whites Directory 1856

Thus we see Skellingthorpe and its Decoy in 1856 in a landscape that is being drained for farming, primarily pasture, but increasingly arable. By 1856 the decoy had not been used for at least ten years and much drainage had commenced in early in that century. In 1808 the Decoy, its pond and the accompanying wood covered 26 acres. Throughout the nineteenth century this was drained and the wood "cashed in" with mature oak and ash trees sold off every few years throughout the nineteenth century as wood changed to grass and grass became cultivated into arable land. Thus, one man-made environment, albeit more nature friendly and bio diverse, gave way to another.

If the reader should take away one clear understanding that is, like the heathlands that once surrounded Lincoln, or the Lincolnshire lime woods planted by the Romans, none of these environments were "wild" but rather managed by man and have not been "wild" for over two thousand years.