13 Weirdest and Most Isolated Villages in Lincolnshire

Lincolnshire looks like the flattest, quietest county in England, and that's exactly why nobody looks twice at it. Underneath that flatness are thirteen villages holding onto things that shouldn't still be standing — a mob game that ends with a man smoked over a fire, a village that vanished so completely all that's left is its shape in the grass, and a marsh hamlet where a decision about the country's nuclear waste is being made right now. In this video, we explore: → Haxey still runs a game dating to around 1359 every sixth of January, where a leather tube gets swayed and pushed by a crowd of hundreds toward one of four pubs, and a man called the Fool stands still while straw is set alight behind him → Gainsthorpe was a working medieval village with its own windmill and chapel until it simply emptied out, leaving nothing behind but earthworks — it became the first deserted village in England ever photographed from the air, in 1925 → Torksey wintered the Viking Great Army across 872 and 873 on a camp more than a hundred times larger than the comparable site at Repton, and today it's just a quiet village on the Trent → Donna Nook is an active RAF bombing range where thousands of grey seals haul out every winter to give birth, with jets and newborn pups sharing the same stretch of coast → Theddlethorpe All Saints, home to a medieval church locals call the Cathedral of the Marsh, sits inside the search area Nuclear Waste Services is actively considering for the country's deep underground nuclear waste site → Somersby's Georgian rectory was Alfred Tennyson's childhood home for twenty-eight years, and the copper beech tree in its garden still shows up in his poetry → Coningsby's church clock has only one hand, dates from the 1600s, and at sixteen and a half feet across is likely the largest single-handed clock face in the world → Dunston Pillar was built in 1751 as a lit tower to guide travellers across a heath plagued by highwaymen, then lost its lantern to a storm and had a bust of King George III mounted on top instead And after twelve entries of ritual, ruin, and a live nuclear fight, this list closes on a hamlet of fewer than 150 people that borrowed the name of the biggest city in America and never grew past a few dozen houses. There's no skyscraper, no harbour, just a road sign in the fens and a chapel nobody worships in anymore. Subscribe for more of the county nobody thought to ask about.