Ancaster sits where two Roman roads crossed, and the Romans built a town to mark the crossing. Ermine Street ran north from London to York along the spine of England, threading the gap in the limestone ridge where the River Trent had once flowed east towards the Wash. King Street came up from Peterborough to meet it. The Romans took an existing Corieltauvi settlement, walled it, paved it, gave it a garrison, and a name they thought meant something - possibly Causennae, though that may have been a different place entirely. Two thousand years later, the village still keeps Roman company. Ploughmen turn up brooches and coins. The corbels of St Martin's parish church rest on Roman foundations. And in 2001, the television archaeologists of Time Team came to dig and found a stone-lined burial with an inscription to a god called Viridius - a name barely attested anywhere else in the Roman world, possibly local to this exact ground.
Walk any road in Ancaster and you are walking on, or beside, or above something Roman. Ermine Street is now the B6403, climbing the High Dike north out of the village to mark the boundary between South and North Kesteven. The Romans built it dead straight on the limestone scarp because that is what Roman roads did: they went where they were going. The walled town that grew at the crossroads protected travellers and traders, controlled the salt routes from the coast, and held a population substantial enough that, when archaeologists dug a cemetery on its edge, they found more than 250 Roman burials including eleven stone sarcophagi. By the late 4th century, with Saxon raiding parties pushing inland, the townsfolk threw up a thick stone wall around the place. You can still see some of the earthworks in the fields. The walls did not save them. The town faded. The roads remained.
Beneath Ancaster lies a layer of oolitic limestone so good and so workable that it has been quarried for two thousand years and sold across the kingdom. Ancaster stone is creamy, fine-grained, durable enough to face a cathedral, soft enough to carve while it is fresh from the ground and harden in the air. The masons of medieval Lincoln chose it to face their cathedral on its hilltop, the tallest building in the world for two centuries when its spire still stood. The masons of medieval London used it. The masons of medieval colleges across England used it. The quarries are still working today. To stand at Ancaster and look up at the limestone ridge is to see the geology of half the great Anglican churches of England, sitting in the ground waiting to be cut. The Romans worked it too, of course. They worked everything they could reach.
The parish church of St Martin stands slightly elevated on the line of Ermine Street, on what was probably a Roman temple. The dedication is no accident: St Martin was a Roman soldier from Tours who converted to Christianity, and churches all over Britain on the sites of Roman shrines bear his name. Walk inside and the building tells its overlapping stories. Norman arches carry decorated carving. An Early English font sits where one might expect a Norman one. The corbels under the roof show medieval faces - a nun with a cup, a farmer in a hood, an older woman, all looking out into the nave as they did when the masons set them eight hundred years ago. In the vestry crouches a Green Man, mouth open, leaves pouring from his lips. On the north side of the tower the eroded remains of a Sheela na gig watch the visitor. And on the east wall, set into the fabric in the 1960s when restorers found them, two Roman relief sculptures stand quietly, having been part of this place for nearly two millennia.
There is one more curiosity here, and it is alive. In 2005 a botanist found tall thrift - a pinkish flowering plant once widespread, now extremely rare - growing in Ancaster churchyard. It is one of only two known sites in the entire country where the plant survives. English Nature stepped in with a preservation regime; the verger and the parish learned to mow around it. Two nature reserves nearby, at Moor Closes and Ancaster Valley, both designated Sites of Special Scientific Interest, hold further populations and the limestone grassland flora that thrive on this dry, calcareous turf. There is a pattern in Ancaster that you start to see if you stay long enough. Roman gods, medieval saints, rare wildflowers, a quiet village pub, the long straight road. All of them holding on against time on a small ridge of good limestone in eastern England, where the routes have crossed since before history was being kept.
Ancaster sits at 52.97N, 0.54W, midway between Sleaford and Grantham on the A153. The village lies in the Ancaster Gap, a natural east-west cut through the Lincoln Edge limestone scarp - clearly visible from the air as a notch in the otherwise continuous ridge running north from Grantham. Nearby airports: RAF Cranwell (EGYD) about 7 miles east, RAF Barkston Heath about 3 miles south. Best viewed at 2,000-3,000 feet; the linear village strung along the old Roman road shows clearly against the limestone fields, with active quarry workings visible on the ridge to the north.