Place:Bicker, Lincolnshire, England

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Bicker is a village in the Borough of Boston, Lincolnshire, England. The population of the village was 941 at the 2011 census. It is situated approximately west-south-west from Boston, and on the A52 road.

The distance omitted in the excerpt from Wikipedia is "approximately 9 miles (10 km) west-south-west from the town of Boston."

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

The medieval estuary, Bicker Haven, which is now a village, took its name from the town of Bicker. It originally formed the outlet of the River Witham which diverted to Boston after a flood in 1014. When the Anglo-Saxon settlers enclosed the marsh for pasture, and the tide no longer reached the haven, it silted-up, whereby Bicker ceased to be a port and became a farming village. This process had already begun with the Donington branch of the haven.

The A52 previously ran through the village, but it is now bypassed to the south. The Bicker Bar roundabout is part of the Swineshead bypass which opened in 1985.

Geography

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Bicker is one of 18 parishes which, together with Boston, form the Borough of Boston in the county of Lincolnshire, England. The local government has been arranged in this way since the reorganization of 1 April 1974, which resulted from the Local Government Act 1972. This parish forms part of the Five Villages Ward of Boston Borough Council and part of the Boston Rural Electoral Division of Lincolnshire County Council.

Hitherto, the parish had formed part of Boston Rural District, in the Parts of Holland. Holland was one of the three divisions (formally known as parts) of the traditional county of Lincolnshire. Since the Local Government Act of 1888, Holland had been in most respects, a county in itself.

The civil parish has an area of around , and includes the hamlet of Hoffleet Stow.

Mill Lane (B1181) joins the bypass to the A17. Bicker and Donington lie either side of the South Holland and Borough of Boston boundary. The boundary follows to the south of the B1181, north of Donington Eaudike. To the west is North Kesteven on the other side of the South Forty-Foot Drain.

The boundary with South Holland at Donington follows the Old Eau to the south-east, passing the northern edge of Rabbit Hills Farm. To the south it meets the parish of Wigtoft. It passes to the west of the A17/B1181 junction at Bank House, named after the former sea bank of Bicker Haven. It follows the A17 to the west, and meets Swineshead at Bolle Hall, following the west of the A17. About 110 yards (100 m) of the A17 is in the parish, including the Bicker Bar roundabout at the A52, and the Bicker Bar motel and Texaco services. The boundary with Swineshead follows to the north-west along a drain south of East Low Grounds, and includes Bicker Gauntlet. It follows North Drove to the north, along Bicker Fen, south of West Low Grounds. At Holt Hills it meets North Kesteven and borders Great Hale for about 330 yards (300 m), then at Ferry Farm borders Little Hale. Near Eau End Farm (on the other side of the drain), it meets South Holland om Middle Fen then passes close to the line of the pylons on North Fen.

The area omitted in the excerpt from Wikipedia is "around 3,800 acres (15 km2)". The parish includes the hamlet of Hoffleet Stow.

Research Tips

• 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.):

• Lincolnshire Ordnance Survey Map of 1888 with Poor Law Union divisions
• Lincolnshire Ordnance Survey Map of 1900 with early Rural District divisions (The best for WeRelate purposes, but the parish names are very hard to read.)
• Lincolnshire Ordnance Survey Map, revised 1937 with later Rural District divisions

• The National Library of Scotland [1] also provides a large number of maps for all the counties and districts of England as well as those of Scotland. Their maps of England only cover modern placenames, but they do allow the user to view a parish in relation to its neighbours. These maps are very easy to read.
• 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 of information 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.

The south of 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 (in the southeast), Parts of Kesteven (in the southwest) and Parts of Lindsey (in the north of the county). 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.