The Golf Hotel, Woodhall Spa

Driving through the foggy fens, mostly behind slow lorries, isn't my idea of fun, but as I had to be in Horncastle by 10am it was a necessary drudge. I was there to attend a meeting of the Love Lincs Plants project, sorting out a strategy for collection of herbarium specimens over the next year. It was a constructive and friendly meeting, so worth the trip.

I decided to return home by a different route and stopped in Woodhall Spa to buy a sandwich (Co-op Onion Bhaji with pickled carrot and beetroot - vegan and very tasty). This was the only photograph that I took - the Golf Hotel which was built in 1880 and is located next to the world famous Woodhall Spa golf course.

Woodhall Spa is a quaint village with a lot of interesting history. The spring that it is named after was discovered by accident in 1811, while prospecting for coal and by 1834 a Spa Baths had been built. The railway arrived in 1848, and this brought increasing popularity and the development of an elegant spa town largely designed by Richard Adolphus Carne. In the Second World War the two major hotels were requisitioned by the RAF, and an airfield was built south of the village. This was the home of  four brave RAF squadrons, including 617 ‘the Dambusters’ Squadron, and there is a memorial to them in the village. The old airfield has recently become a reserve of the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust. 


Woodhall Spa is also the home of the Kinema in the Woods. It dates from 1922, and it is the only fully functioning cinema in the UK to employ back-projection. In June 1987 a Compton Kinestra organ was installed in The Kinema, which features an ornate lacquered red and gold console with an eighteenth century oriental design.  The organ is still situated in Screen One and played regularly by The Kinema's resident organist, Alan Underwood. Just like old times!