Place:Eastoft, North Lincolnshire, Lincolnshire, England

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

Eastoft is a village and civil parish in North Lincolnshire, England. It is situated within the Isle of Axholme, north-east from Crowle, and on the A161 road.

The 2001 census recorded a parish population of 378, increasing to 431 at the 2011 census.

Geography

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

The village is a linear settlement along the A161 between Crowle and Goole, and includes a junction with the B1392 road leading to the village of Luddington. It comprises more than , and for the most part is little above sea-level. The parish is drained by a network of drainage ditches, which feed into the Adlingfleet Drain, running north-eastwards from the site of the railway crossing on the A161, and by the Pauper's Drain, running eastwards along the southern edge of the parish.^[1]

The north-western edge of the parish is bordered by the parishes of Twin Rivers and Reedness, and this boundary is also the border between East Riding of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. To the east is Luddington, part of the civil parish of Luddington and Haldenby, and to the south is Crowle.^[1]

Roughly 2 kilometres to the south-west of Eastoft village there is a nature reserve and Site of Special Scientific Interest called Eastoft Meadow. Meadows are a vanishing habitat in the British countryside with 97% of them destroyed since the 1930s As of 2019 the site is not open to the public.

History

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

Specialists note the oldest mentions for Eastoft (Lincolnshire and West Riding of Yorkshire) Eschetoft around 1170, Esketoft around 1200 and Esktoft 13th century and suggest an Old Scandinavian origin, with the name formed from eski "ash-tree" and toft (< Old Norse topt) "a homestead, the site of a house and its out-buildings", sometimes toft may also signify "a settlement site and its accompanying land". On this basis, it would mean "Homestead, house or curtilage where ash trees are growing". The difficulty to articulate the group /skt/ and the attraction of the common word East- explain the final evolution Eastoft. On this basis, it was finally understood as "Homestead with enclosure to the east of Crowle.^[2] Toft is sometimes associated with tree names. Similar place names in Normandy include Ectot-l'Auber and Ectot-lès-Baons (Eschetoth, Esketoth 1074). from eski "ash-tree" and toft. Eshetoftes, YWR, Eshetoftes 1158–67. < OE æsċ "ash-tree", is the Anglo-Scandinavian version of this place name.

The earliest known record of Eastoft dates from 1164, when there was a dispute between the Vicar of Adlingfleet and the abbot of Selby. Both claimed rights to the tithes from Reedness and Eastoft, and the dispute was settled when the Archbishop of York intervened, and ruled that the vicar of Adlingfleet should receive the tithes during his lifetime, but that he should make a payment of 40 shillings each year to the Abbey at Selby.

Eastoft became a separate parish on 25 September 1855, when it was created from parts of Adlingfleet and Crowle. In 1900 Kelly's Directory noted that although it was a single ecclesiastical parish, it was still two civil parishes, known as Eastoft, Yorkshire and Eastoft, Lincolnshire. The area of the parish was listed as in Yorkshire and in Lincolnshire. At the time, the church, the school and the vicarage were all in Yorkshire, and there were two halls. William Coulman was a Justice of the Peace and lived in Eastoft Hall, Yorkshire, while William Halkon lived at Eastoft Hall, Lincolnshire. The plantation next to Halkon's residence had once housed a chapel of ease and a burial ground, but all traces of them had gone by 1900.^[2]

The River Don used to run directly through the middle of the village, on its route to its confluence with the River Trent near Adlingfleet. However, in 1626, Cornelius Vermuyden began the drainage of Hatfield Chase, and re-routed the river northwards from Stainforth to join the River Aire. He also re-routed the River Idle and the River Torne, both of which joined it at Sandtoft and contributed to its flow. Parts of the original course are marked on modern maps, one to the south-west and the other to the north-east of the village, and their orientation points to the presence of several large meanders in the vicinity. Before the drainage, the quality of the soil was poorer than soils on the higher areas of the Isle of Axholme. Land in Epworth, Haxey and Owston Ferry could be used for growing crops every year, but in Crowle and Eastoft, crops were normally grown for three years, and the land was left fallow for the fourth.

The Paupers Drain to the south of Eastoft predates the works of Vermuyden. Following his work, there was social unrest, which was not finally resolved until 1717. After that, some improvements to the drainage of the area were made, including a new sewer, which crossed the Pauper's Drain, and was designed to remove water from Eastoft, Crowle and Luddington. It drained into the River Trent through a sluice at Keadby, but the sluice failed in 1761, resulting in devastating floods.

Between 1903 and 1965, the village was served by Eastoft railway station on the Fockerby branch of the Axholme Joint Railway, although passenger services ended in 1933. The station was by the main road over to the north of the village, and the first sod was cut on 22 September 1898 by William Halkon of Eastoft Hall, the chairman of the directors, on land which was part of Boltgate Farm and belonged to Mr. Bramhill. Following the ceremony, toasts were made in the farmhouse. One of the contractors' locomotives used in the building of the line was named Halkon, after the chairman, and was used to convey a special train when the North Eastern Railway inspected the line, before taking it over from the original company. At the time, only Eastoft station was finished, and was cited as an example of how the others should be completed. The final train carrying passengers was chartered by North Axholme Secondary School and ran on 1 April 1965, four days before closure. The opening of the crossing gates over the A161 road at Eastoft was featured in television coverage of the event.

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.