River Witham Walks

For nearly 1,500 years between the Roman Occupation and the dissolution of the monasteries, Lincoln owed its strategic and political importance to its situation in a gap in the Lincoln Edge at the meeting oftwo rivers, the Till and the Witham. These rivers met in a natural lake at Brayford Pool and in about 120AD Roman engineers took advantage of this harbour to connect the colony to the River Trent via Britain's first canal, the Fossdyke Navigation.

In the marshes to the south of the city lay a patchwork of watermeadows known as 'holmes'. To the northeast, recent aerial photography has revealed that Lincoln once lay close to another estuary and it is possible that Brayford Pool was directly connected to the sea. East of Brayford the Witham flowed in a wide southeasterly curve to The Wash.

In 1848, the Great Northern Railway came to Lincoln and within 20 years the railways had effectively replaced waterways as the principal means of transporting people and goods. The loop line that followed the course of the Witham between Boston and Lincoln now forms part of the Viking Way and the Sustrans Cycle route linking Barton-on-Humber to Boston.