The beginning

OUR TOWNS and cities have sprung up from small beginnings and so it has been with Bourne. Imagine open countryside where you now see the shops and houses, no roads or buildings of any kind, but a landscape of streams, dense woods and scrubland and large areas of marsh covered with sedge and teeming with wildlife.

This is how this part of Lincolnshire looked in the distant past, when the inhabitants stayed alive by hunting for their food, killing wild animals, birds and fish, with primitive weapons and living in shelters made from branches and leaves. At first they led a nomadic life, roaming from place to place, usually where the hunting was best, but soon they began to settle when they found somewhere that suited their needs and as fresh water was vital to life, they sought out those places which provided it.

One such spot was a pool fed by a series of underground springs that never dried up, even in the hottest of weather, and providing a continual supply for drinking and cooking. This was the lake we know today as St Peter’s Pool, or the Wellhead, one of the oldest underground springs in England, and as the first hunters chose to settle on its banks thousands of years ago, a small community was created which in the centuries that followed, slowly turned into the Bourne we know today.

The surrounding area has now become a modern market town, originally known as Bourn but the name changed to Bourne in 1893 to avoid postal confusion with Bourn in Cambridgeshire. The pool remains virtually unchanged as a reminder of our historic past, still producing thousands of gallons of fresh water every day. But it is now pumped out and sent through pipes to homes and shops, offices and factories over a very wide area, providing a constant supply to other places such as Spalding and even Peterborough, and this reminds us that fresh water has always been vital to our existence.