England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Cold Hanworth All Saints

The Parish

The parish of Cold Hanworth lies in central Lincolnshire roughly 5 miles southwest of the market town of Market Rasen. Cold Hanworth sits around 2 miles northwest of the A46 road which links Lincoln with Market Rasen. Cold Hanworth is a tiny place with its village merely a remnant of a once thriving community, the humps and bumps of the deserted medieval village lie scattered around the former church. Today's remnants are merely a scatter of farms and cottages. Like most Lincolnshire parishes Cold Hanworth is an arable farming parish with broad hedge-less fields of mainly cereals. Cold Hanworth is drained southwards by the headwaters of the Barlings Eau, this small stream meets the River Witham to the northwest of Bardney before heading through Boston to the North Sea.Cold Hanworth is sited at around 10 metres above the sea in a generally flatish area of the county where local heights of over 50 metres are only reached at the A15's route some miles to the west. At only 850 acres Cold Hanworth parish was rather small and equally small was its population of between 50 & 100 parishioners. In Domesday times Cold Hanworth was a little more substantial, shared between Roger of Poitou, Kolsveinn of Lincoln & Lambert's son Jocelyn it could muster 7 ploughs some meadows and there was a mill.

The Church

All Saints' church was deconsecrated in 1980 and has been sold as a private dwelling, as it sits accessed by a short track it has no current access, The former church is also a relatively modern building built in 1862 at the expense of the local gentleman, Commodore Peter Cracroft, and described castigatingly by Pevsner as "High Victorian self confidence at its most horrible". Guarded by a lychgate, elaborate in stone, and full of spiky architectural flourishes the building is typical of what Pevsner terms "rogue architecture". Given the small size of the congregation it is not surprising that this building no longer serves its purpose.