Holbeach

Holbeach is a fenland market town with approximately 5,000 residents in the South Holland district of southern Lincolnshire. The town lies 8 miles from Spalding; 17 from Boston; 20 from King's Lynn; 23 from Peterborough; and a long 43 miles (69 km) by road from the county town of Lincoln.

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The town's market charter was awarded in 1252 to Thomas de Moulton, a local baron. The magnificent All Saints' Church was built in the fourteenth century, and incorporated parts of de Moulton's ruined castle.

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Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the sea came to within two miles of the town, and there were severe floods recorded in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The land drainage programmes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moved the coastline of The Wash to nine miles away, leaving Holbeach surrounded by more than 23,000 acres (93 km²) of reclaimed fertile agricultural land.

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The name "Holbeach" also applies to the entire parish of Holbeach, (population 24,000 and one of the largest parishes by area in England), and along with the town of Holbeach proper, the name is found in several villages in the Lincolnshire Fens:

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• Holbeach St. Matthew
• Holbeach St. Marks
• Holbeach St. Johns
• Holbeach Hurn
• Holbeach Drove
• Holbeach Clough
• Holbeach Bank

This repetition of a name for a collection of close-lying villages is common in the Fens (cf. Gedney, Tydd, Walpole etc.)

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Holbeach is home to a campus of the University of Lincoln, redeveloped in 2004 on the site of a former agricultural college, and now known as the Holbeach Technology Park. The campus is dedicated to the study of food manufacturing technology.

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The Royal Air Force maintains a bombing range, known officially as RAF Holbeach, on salt marshland at the coast of Holbeach parish, near the village of Gedney Drove End.

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The local football team are Holbeach United Football Club, founded in 1929. They play in the United Counties League of the English football league system, and are known as "The Tigers", in reference to the "Fen Tigers", eighteenth-century locals who adopted guerilla tactics in an attempt to stop the destruction of their way of life through the draining of the Fens.

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Fenland: Fenland is a local government district in Cambridgeshire, England. Its council is based in March, and covers the neighbouring market towns of Chatteris, Whittlesey, and Wisbech (often called the "capital of the fens"). The district covers around 500 square kilometers of mostly agricultural land in ...

Market town: In medieval law, a market town is a town that has the right to hold markets. Market towns are opposed to villages, which are typically smaller and do not have this right, and to cities, which are typically larger and often have additional rights....

South Holland: :This article is about the province of the Netherlands. For the town in the United States, see South Holland, Illinois; for the district of Lincolnshire, see South Holland, England...