Searching the history of houses in Hickling – can you help? We have recently uploaded our first full house history; Hodson’s Yard/Holly House. The owners kindly gave us access to a bundle of deeds and documents dating back to 1803, although the old cottage/cottages would have been there for a considerable time before that. We have been able to add family connections and also notes about the old cruck cottage building – one of the last ones to be demolished in the village (1965). The earlier property had a number of names; Hodson’s Yard, Corner’s Yard, The Retreat, Holly Cottage, The Hollies and a fascinating history – please have a good explore and if you have similar material relating to your own house in Hickling, please contact us and we can help you with transcriptions and a bit of further research, too. Over the coming weeks, we will be adding photographs from the Wadkin archives to our house pages – we will post when they have all been uploaded!

Following a recent enquiry we have been exploring the Horse-Causy (Boulder Causeway) which used to run along the western side of Main Street. The roads were impassable in bad weather and the boulder causeway was the solution – keeping everything going. Can you imagine a time when one of the annual parish jobs was to plough and harrow Main Street?! The boulder causeway was replaced with modern pavements in 1912 as a Coronation project but we have a few photos of it before it disappeared.

How much do you know about the development of our village streets & have any of these old cobbles survived in your garden?!

This article was written right at the end of the working life of the Grantham Canal and is a wonderfully idiosyncratic walk along the full length from Nottingham to Grantham. There is room for a bit of fact-checking but it’s a great read!

(Many thanks to Tony Jackson and the GCS for sharing this transcript and the photos)

For several years February was Panto season in Hickling – sometimes because December was targeted but it never quite happened in time but it was also a great January pick-me-up. We hope you will enjoy a trip down Memory Lane! If you can help with extra photos or programmes or scripts from productions of the past (especially of the Hickling Players), please message us or comment, below.

Bob Timms has kindly offered us access to his family history. The Timms, Woolley, Starbuck, Soar and Armstrong names are well known in the village as well as having links to both the Plough Inn and the Post Office. We are grateful that he has passed on both photographs and written histories.

New galleries of the recent snowy weather added to the weather page; also included on the Church, Canal and There but not There pages. Plus extra info added to the flooding sections.

Please get in touch if you have any photos or info that we could add to these pages – thank you!

New page added following the historic convergence of Jupiter and Saturn in December; please contact us with your photos! Page also includes the 1999 solar eclipse.

We have recently been asking around for stories of skating on the Hickling Canal Basin and we’ve had a great response – thank you! What we have, so far, can now be found on this page. We’d love to add more – please get in touch with anecdotes and pictures!

In the last 6months we have received two separate enquiries about local families emigrating to Australia (Starbucks) and New Zealand (Woolleys) and then, more recently, an account of the deportation of a Hickling man, John Morrison – adding to ongoing research (although not on the website yet, I’m afraid). The first two stories have now been written up; Joseph Starbuck & the James T Foord Cholera Ship and Samuel Woolley and the Plough Inn. Strangely, it is possible that these two families may have come together again in New Zealand but we are still looking into this – far more questions than answers, so far!

Updates on the Local History website:

Nothing major recently but several bits’n’pieces:

· Protestation Returns 1842: we found a copy of a book which transcribed all the Nottingham Returns  – a few minor changes made (although we’ve gone with our local interpretation of some of the entries …).

· The emigration stories have continued to develop: it seems that Mark Starbuck (on the James T Foord cholera ship) moved on to New Zealand and settled in the same area as Samuel Woolley (Plough Inn article, last issue) – he was even licensee of a Plough Inn but there is no firm evidence directly linking them to each other …

· More added to the Lengthsman’s Hut  renovations page.

· Some new aerial photos of the village from the church tower.

· Kinoulton Estate Auction catalogue 1919; we now have copies of the maps/plans that accompany the catalogue.

· An article about the Trent Bore has been added to the Anglo-Saxon Vikings page

· A new article about The Mrs Mabel March Cup has been added to the page about  Horticultural/Flower/Produce Shows. Her story is fascinating and we’d love to hear from you, if you can answer any of the remaining questions. Also added to the page is a gallery of newspaper articles recording shows from years gone by.