It has been on my mind for months to find a walk that explores the Kettlethorpe estate as it might have been in the time of Katherine and Hugh. Not just to walk it, but to try—properly—to find Katherine within her own landscape here in Lincolnshire. With the help of a leaflet available in Kettlethorpe Church, I have finally managed to piece together a short 4.5-mile route that does exactly that.
In glorious sunshine this afternoon, with my wife Rosemary and Henry—our cockapoo, on his lead throughout—we set out from the door of Kettlethorpe Church to test it.
The route takes you first to Fenton, then on to Laughterton, before an out-and-back stretch down to the River Trent via Marsh Lane. On the surface, it is a straightforward rural walk. But look more closely and it maps almost perfectly onto what was once the core of a medieval estate of around 3,000 acres, centred on Kettlethorpe and worked through settlements like Fenton and Laughterton.
Fenton feels exactly what it would have been: working land. Productive, organised, and essential to the estate. Laughterton is different. Its long, linear form still hints at planning—at structure imposed rather than grown. You begin to see that this is not random countryside, but something shaped, managed, and understood.
And then, if you slow down and actually look, the land starts to give itself away.
In places the pasture rises and falls in long, gentle waves—ridge and furrow. Medieval ploughing, still there under your feet. These are the strips worked by tenants of the estate, turned over season after season, year after year, building up those ridges almost imperceptibly. It is one of those moments where the past stops being abstract. You are not imagining it—you are standing in it.
We stopped in Laughterton to read the memorial to the two RAF crashes in 1944. A Stirling lost on a training flight. A Lancaster returning from operations. It is a quiet, understated memorial, but it shifts something. The same fields, six centuries later, carrying very different lives and very different losses. It doesn’t feel like an addition to the story—it feels like part of the same place continuing.
From there, Marsh Lane takes you down towards the Trent. The name alone tells you what you need to know. This is marshland—low, wet, and always slightly uncertain. In Katherine’s time, before any modern drainage, this would have been ground that demanded attention. Sometimes valuable, sometimes problematic, always needing to be managed. The estate didn’t just sit on the land—it had to work with it.
And then the Trent itself. Wide, slow, and deceptively calm. A boundary, a resource, and at times no doubt a problem. Standing there, it is easier to understand the scale of what Katherine held here—not just status, but responsibility. Land, water, people, obligation.
This walk doesn’t give you spectacle. It gives you something better.
It gives you a landscape that still makes sense.
And for me, that is where Katherine is easiest to find—not in the grandeur of Lincoln Cathedral, but here, in the fields around Kettlethorpe, where her life was actually lived.
