Great Bell of Burgh le Marsh

The Lincolnshire coast was notorious for wreckers who lit false beacons to lure ships onto the shallows, then plundered the wreckage. Burgh le Marsh, two miles inland from the coast, had its share of such iniquity. The legend centres on a winter storm in 1629, when the Mary Rose of Leith was fighting its way through howling seas toward Flanders with a cargo of cloth. Onshore, the wreckers prepared their beacon.

That night, the sexton of St Peter and St Paul's church — a man named Guymer — barricaded himself inside and began ringing the great bell, 'Grandsire Bob', with all the strength he possessed. The sailors heard it through the storm, recognised it for a true church bell and not a wreckers' fire, and steered clear of the shallows. When the belfry door was broken down at dawn, Guymer was found still clinging to the rope, dead from the exhaustion of a night's continuous ringing.

Captain Frohock of the Mary Rose returned to Burgh to give thanks. When he discovered what had actually happened, he purchased an acre of land in perpetuity for the upkeep of the bell, which became known as Bell String Acre. The curfew bell at Burgh tolled twice daily between October and March in Guymer's commemoration until late in the twentieth century. The tradition was collected and published by the Lincolnshire historian Ethel Rudkin and later by the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project; the church's peal of eight bells, which still rings regularly, carries the memory forward.