Giving Lincolnshire its due

Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire Derek Turner

(Hurst, £20)

MAY we play a word-association game? I say ‘Lincolnshire’ and you reply... Yes, you might struggle to find anything to say about the ancient shire of that name. Perhaps ‘cathedral’ and ‘cabbages’ will float up through the mist of memory. I doubt many of us can place the county precisely in the geography of the isles. (It is in the East Midlands, hard against the North Sea.)

This unknownness is what attracted Derek Turner to the county 20 years ago when he was looking to escape London and everyone else middle class—he’s a journalist and novelist—was heading for Norfolk or Devon: ‘The name resonated because it was so rarely heard.’ In this, his history of Lincolnshire, Mr Turner gives the forgotten county its due; he pins it to the map. However, this is