Quick note – new pages uploaded for the Daft Family history!

So the football has finished, now … To celebrate the nation’s success, English Heritage launched ‘Names of England’ – an England flag showing 32,000 surnames (every name with 100 or more occurrences between April and September 2019). Attached to the flag is a search box where you can find the origins of every one of these surnames; click on the link and play!

Also, below; ‘The Celebrated Hickling Swifts’ c.1902!

We have uploaded the first information that we have for our new page on the Hickling WI – if you can help us with new information and photographs, we would love to hear from you!

The 2022 Calendar is now available; follow this link for more information (price £7.50 each – fundraising for the Hickling Notts Local History Group).

Thank you to everyone who gave us photographs for this year’s fundraising calendar; they are all very different, absolutely amazing and it was extremely hard to choose – the finished calendar includes a mixture of old photographs and new. We hope that you enjoy the calendar when it comes out and the gallery in the meantime!

If you have any photographs that you would like to add to the Gallery, please send them through for us all to enjoy.

Houses and Buildings of Hickling: the pages are gradually beginning to emerge (apologies, it is a long job!). New this week is the background for Glebe Cottage next to the Church which is being beautifully restored and is beginning to come back to life as a family home again.

A chance to make our mark on history – Census Day is on Sunday March 21st 2021. Two new pages have been added to the website: Census Records and 1939 Register.

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)