Timothy Richard Matthews was born in 1826 and died in 1910, and for nearly half a century the parish of North Cotes was his life. He took charge as curate in 1859 and became rector in 1869. He was, by every account, an enthusiastic amateur musician with a particular passion for composing church music. He published many hymn tunes during his ministry, two of which carried the names of his Lincolnshire parishes - 'North Coates' and 'Ludborough.' He compiled The North Coates Supplemental Tune Book, published in 1883 and revised in 1899. He even commissioned two volumes of new organ music, The Village Organist of 1870 and 1872, with the proceeds going to the North Coates organ fund. A small village can produce a long shadow when one of its rectors decides to make himself useful for forty-eight years.

The parish church is dedicated to St Nicholas, patron of sailors - appropriate in a village four miles from a working coast. The building has stood here since the thirteenth century, though most of what you see today is the work of James Fowler of Louth, who rebuilt the church in 1865. Fowler kept the original limestone walls where he could and added the upper part of the font in his Victorian Gothic style, leaving the lower half twelfth-century. In the churchyard stands a scheduled medieval cross with a square base, believed to be in its original position - older than most of the church around it. The Grade II* listing recognises both halves of the building: the medieval bones and the careful Victorian skin Fowler wrapped them in.

Across the village, Ivy Cottage stands as a smaller architectural surprise. An early eighteenth-century dwelling, completely unaltered, in its original condition - the kind of building that gets a Grade II* listing not because it is grand but because it has somehow survived three centuries of modernising owners without being modernised. Most houses of its age have been opened up, extended, fitted with bathrooms and kitchens that bear no relationship to how the original residents lived. Ivy Cottage has not. To stand in its rooms is to stand where Georgians stood, with the same proportions and the same small windows. It is the rarest kind of preservation: not curated, just left alone.

Two miles north of the village, the long flat field that opened as an RAF training ground in 1916 went on to become Britain's first Bloodhound surface-to-air missile base in 1963. Between those two dates, RAF North Coates was a Coastal Command station from which Beaufighter Strike Wings flew anti-shipping missions across the North Sea against German convoys. The airfield closed in 1990. From 1992 the buildings and runways were sold off in lots. The North Coates Flying Club now uses one of the original hangars and operates from a grass airstrip laid alongside what was once concrete runway. From the village, you can drive up the lane to where the perimeter fence once stood. The control tower is gone. The hangar remains. Inside it, light planes wait for weekend pilots, where in 1942 ground crews readied Bristol Beaufighters for the next strike.

The village sits on the Marshes, the broad band of reclaimed land between the Lincolnshire Wolds and the coast. The A1031 runs through, joining North Cotes to Cleethorpes nine miles north and Mablethorpe twelve miles south. The fields are arable: wheat, barley, potatoes. The horizon is enormous, broken by the church tower, by power lines, and by the occasional silhouette of a single-engine trainer banking over the airstrip. North Cotes is what most coastal Lincolnshire still is - a working village, a fine church, a couple of houses worth a second look, and a name that a Victorian rector happened to make famous in a way nobody planned.