Place:Old Leake, Lincolnshire, England

Watchers
NameOld Leake
Alt namesLechesource: Domesday Book (1985) p 173
TypeParish (ancient), Civil parish
Coordinates53.032°N 0.097°E
Located inLincolnshire, England
Also located inHolland, England     (1889 - 1974)
See alsoNew Leake, Lincolnshire, Englandneighbouring parish, see below
Boston Rural, Holland, Englandrural district in which it was located 1894-1974
Boston District, Lincolnshire, Englanddistrict municipality covering the area since 1974
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names


Old Leake and New Leake are two neighbouring parishes with New Leake being north of Old Leake. Since 1894 they have been in different administrative areas. Although Old Leake was the village with the railway station and could therefore be considered to be more prominent, it is New Leake that is usually (but not by John Marius Wilson) described as "Leake".

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Old Leake from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"LEAKE, a parish in Boston district, Lincoln; on the East Lincoln railway, the Hobhole drain, and the coast, 7 miles NE of Boston. It contains Old Leake [railway] station and New Leake village, and has a post office under Boston. Acres: 7,655; of which 1,775 are fen. Real property, £15,312. Population in 1811: 922; in 1851, 2,062; in 1861, 1,912. Houses, 376. The increase of population from 1811 to 1851 arose chiefly from the enclosure of 1,537 acres in the East Fen. The property is much subdivided, but is largely held by four. Moat House, about 1½ mile E of the church, occupies the site of an ancient chantry; was rebuilt, in 1835, by the Hon. B. Percy; and contains wainscotted rooms, and some curious carving. Derby Hall, at a short distance, is a large ancient mansion. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Lincoln. Value: £200. Patrons: the Governors of Oakham and Uppingham schools. The church has a clerestoried nave, partly later English, but chiefly decorated, and a tower built in 1490-1547; and contains three sedilia, an octagonal font, and an alabaster effigies of a knight. There are two Wesleyan chapels, a Primitive Methodist chapel, a British school, and charities £150."
A description of the modern settlement is provided by Wikipedia

Old Leake is a village and civil parish in Lincolnshire, England. It is situated approximately 8 miles (13 km) northeast from Boston, and on the A52 road between Leverton and Wrangle at the junction of the B1184 (from Sibsey). Areas included in the parish are The Gride to the north-west, Leake Commonside and Lade Bank to the north, and Leake Hurns End to the south-east. The coast of The Wash lies 3 miles (5 km) to the east of the village.

Research Tips

Lincolnshire is very low-lying and land had to be drained for agriculture to be successful. The larger drainage channels, many of which are parallel to each other, became boundaries between parishes. Many parishes are long and thin for this reason.

There is much fenland in Lincolnshire, particularly in the Boston and Horncastle areas. Fenlands tended to be extraparochial before the mid 1850s, and although many sections were identified with names and given the title "civil parish", little information has been found about them. Many appear to be abolished in 1906, but the parish which adopts them is not given in A Vision of Britain through Time. Note the WR category Lincolnshire Fenland Settlements which is an attempt to organize them into one list.

From 1889 until 1974 Lincolnshire was divided into three administrative counties: Parts of Holland, Parts of Kesteven and Parts of Lindsey. These formal names do not fit with modern grammatical usage, but that is what they were, nonetheless. In 1974 the northern section of Lindsey, along with the East Riding of Yorkshire, became the short-lived county of Humberside. In 1996 Humberside was abolished and the area previously in Lincolnshire was made into the two "unitary authorities" of North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire. The remainder of Lincolnshire was divided into "non-metropolitan districts" or "district municipalities" in 1974. Towns, villages and parishes are all listed under Lincolnshire, but the present-day districts are also given so that places in this large county can more easily be located and linked to their wider neighbourhoods. See the WR placepage Lincolnshire, England and the smaller divisions for further explanation.

  • Maps provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time show all the parishes and many villages and hamlets. (Small local reorganization of parishes took place in the 1930s led to differences between the latter two maps.):
  • FindMyPast now has a large collection of Lincolnshire baptisms, banns, marriages and burials now available to search by name, year, place and parent's names. This is a pay website. (blog dated 16 Sep 2016)
  • GENUKI's page on Lincolnshire's Archive Service gives addresses, phone numbers, webpages for all archive offices, museums and libraries in Lincolnshire which may store old records and also presents a list entitled "Hints for the new researcher" which may include details of which you are not aware. These suggestions are becoming more and more outdated, but there's no telling what may be expected in a small library.
  • GENUKI also has pages of information on individual parishes, particularly ecclesiastical parishes. The author may just come up with morsels not supplied in other internet-available sources.
  • Deceased Online now has records for 11 cemeteries and two crematoria in Lincolnshire. This includes Grimsby's Scartho Road cemetery, Scartho Road crematorium, and Cleethorpes cemetery, council records for the City of Lincoln and Gainsborough, and older church records from The National Archives for St Michael's in Stamford, and St Mark's in Lincoln, dating back to 1707. This is a pay website.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Old Leake. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.