Two linking features of the Tofts are the footpaths
that run for much of their length. Both start on
Sailholme in Wainfleet St Mary and the central
‘High Street’ goes all the way to Wrangle Hall (TF
431 504), becoming Mill Lane for a small portion
of its route in Wrangle. It is mostly perched just
to the west of the crest of the contiguous Tofts.
The easterly Fore-path (the present author’s
label), which neither the Ordnance Survey nor
Hallam singled out, is subsumed into the A52
for parts of its length and then joins the High
Street at Judegate Farm in Wrangle (TF 446
519). In Wainfleet St Mary the path transects
the crescentic mounds of the filtration-unit saltmaking
area partially excavated by McAvoy and
just inland of it there is a line of farms and houses
which correspond to the expected positions
of salt-cotes; on the early Ordnance Survey
maps these are simply cottages. The same maps
(starting with the surveyors’ drawings) show the
waste mounds from Wainfleet St Mary almost to
the southern edge of Friskney but not in Wrangle;
they terminate where the A52 makes a sharp
turn over the Tofts and close to the Wapentake
boundary between Skirbeck (once Wolmersty)
and Candleshoe.
If the Fore-path might date to the decades
around 1500, could a date be affixed to High
Street? Disregarding the Ordnance Survey’s
early fixation with a ‘Roman Road’, Hallam
(1965, p. 80) quotes a document of 1182–1200
referring to ‘a road to the south as far as the
haven of Wainfleet’ (a via meridiana usque ad havene
de Waynflete) as meaning a pre-1086 existence. The
seventeenth-century Landlawer (a render of lands
liable to taxation for sea defence) makes it clear
that the High Street was known in Wainfleet St
Mary as the ‘sedykstight’, a name which in 1472
located a grant to:
John Maryng [and others] one toft with buildings
on it called Ellerkertoft lying in Wainfleet in the
parish of St Mary between the land of Thomas
Kyme called le Halltofte on the S and the land of
John Lawson on the N, abutting on Normandepe
towards the E and on le Sedykstyght towards the
W. (L) (Bethlem. Box 49 V. xiv).
This suggests that the Fore-path was not yet in
existence, so possibly 1500 is a realistic date for
it, assuming it was indeed a sea-bank. Another
High Street/Sedykstyght puzzle is the presence
of a sea-bank near if not actually on the crest of
the raised ground of the Tofts. One explanation
might be in the raised sea-levels of the fourteenth
century when even the protection afforded by
mounds of waste needed supplementing by a
bank. More likely perhaps is the shrinkage of
the land around as it became de-watered after
effective drainage in the nineteenth century and
after. The church at Wainfleet St Mary stands on a
mound above the Low Grounds and although this
knoll has been attributed to salt waste, it is equally
likely to have been produced by pumping, first
by windmills and then by steam and eventually
electricity.