England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Sotby St Peter

The Parish

The parish of Sotby lies in central Lincolnshire roughly 8 miles northeast of the market town of Horncastle and a similar distance southwest of Louth. Sotby sits just over a mile west of the B1225 road which heads northwards along the crest of the Lincolnshire Wolds from just north of Horncastle through to Caistor. Sotby is a tiny place with juts a handful of farms and cottages gathered around a pair of junctions to lanes that form an "H" on its side both lanes being joined by a short spur of a connecting lane. Like most Lincolnshire parishes Sotby would have, and indeed still does, earn its income from arable farming, sitting high on the Wolds the soils are rather thin but still suitable for cereals. Sotby is drained eastwards by small brooks heading for the River Bain which heads off southwards passing through Horncastle before meeting the Witham and onward to the North Sea arriving through the port of Boston. Sotby is sited at around 70 metres above the sea in gentle terrain that rises eastwards to the B1225 where a local high spot of 108 metres can be found at Ranby church. Sotby parish was fairly typically sized for its area, covering close to 1,600 acres it would have supported a population of around 150 parishioners. In Domesday times Sotby was one of Bishop Odo of Bayeux's many holding, a typically small and rural place offering just 4 ploughs and an 150 acre meadow. 

The Church

St Peter's church was declared redundant in 1981 and has been sold as a private house, it sat some 50 metres west of the northernmost of Sotby's two junctions. Like many isolated small rural churches it has ancient fabric left untouched from the earliest times. The chancel arch is of the 12th century, Norman Romanesque in style whilst the nave is clearly medieval too but much altered. The church once possessed a western tower, today merely a bellcote, but this was demolished in 1773 when the nave was also shortened from the west. The chancel, itself, was rebuilt in Victorian times during a restoration of 1857 and employed the Early English Gothic style pertaining to the 13th century, perhaps indicative of the former chancel's origins. Access to the site is now restricted vehemently, the owners even resorting to having views of the building pixellated on street-view, viewing should be strictly brief and limited to from the public road.