North Kyme Village
 

Landmarks

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The market cross is certainly the oldest structure in North Kyme.  Standing in the centre of the village the cross has featured in nearly all the old photographs of the village. The monument consists of two base steps with a socket stone, surviving to what is thought to be its full original height.  The cross was renovated in 1821 (denoted with the inscription "IT 1821" and again in the early 1950s.  Before the renovation was complete the children of North Kyme school buried a time capsule under the cross.  Articles included: A fizzy pop bottle, the coins that were in circulation at the time, a news paper along with notes about the school.  This was all carried out under the watchful eye of the then headmaster Mr Henry King.

This is an excerpt taken from the Lincolnshire heritage site. If you know of (and I know you do) any specific history of our cross then please e-mail us and tell us about it.

North Kyme Market cross

Because a standing cross is a holy place they became used as locations to validate deals or transactions and thus the market cross was born. There are good examples of market crosses at Spilsby, Grantham and Tattershall. In some towns the market cross becomes a whole building, bearing a cross on its top. The butter cross at Burwell (now the Church Hall) is one of the few examples of such structures in Lincolnshire.

 
The destruction of crosses
Most of the standing crosses you can see today are either the broken remains of a cross or a 19th or 20th century restoration. Very few have survived intact. Why have these holy monuments been so systematically destroyed? ... well, during the reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries they were considered to be papist symbols and the tops of them were smashed off. The only one I know of in the county that has survived is the cross in Somersby Churchyard - here a 15 foot, tapering octagonal shaft topped with a simple gabled cross head still stands. At North Kyme, most (about 10 foot) of the shaft is still there, although the cross head itself is lost.

North Kyme Millennium Stone and Bench.

The stone and bench stand adjacent to the market cross.  Both were commissioned for the millennium.  The village was granted £400 from North Kesteven to contribute towards the villages celebrations.  A committee was formed headed by Glynn Pout to decide on how to spend the money. A lot of time was taken deciding on what permanent fixture could be placed in the village to mark the turn of the century.  The idea of the stone came from a trip to Tattershall Castle, where names from way, way back could be seen that had been carved by the graffiti artists of their day.  So. after weeks of investigation and pleading poverty, the stone was brought in from a quarry in Yorkshire (as local stone was deemed to be too soft) at a cost of £10 (a tip for the driver).  The stone was machine and manhandled into place over a weekend with the help of nearly every able bodied man in the village (see history page).

If you see anybody in the village "defacing" the stone by scratching their name onto the surface, don't be annoyed.  That's exactly what it is there for.

A robust steel bench was constructed by Chris Hammond of main Street, to be placed by the stone on the small green outside the Coach House Motel

St Luke's Church

 The new church, dedicated to St. Luke, was built in 1877 and seats about 250. A relatively modern church the old church of North Kyme was pulled down at the time of Reformation.  It is a fact that church was designed and planned sitting around a table of the Plough Inn. Read the history of ST Luke's

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