Qualla: Ancaster, Lincolnshire

Ancaster, Lincolnshire: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Ancaster, Lincolnshire: Two Roads, One Town

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 b...

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Ancaster, Lincolnshire: The Stone That Built Lincoln

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 gro...

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Ancaster, Lincolnshire: St Martin's and the God Viridius

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 sh...

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Ancaster, Lincolnshire: Tall Thrift and Other Survivors

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Natu...

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