About our Town
Holbeach is an ancient market town - the third largest in the Lincolnshire Fens.
Land reclamation of the Middle Ages means Holbeach is also the largest parish in Lincolnshire - and one of the largest in the whole country. Settlements such as Holbeach St Marks and Hollbeach St Matthew emerged around the Wash. Moulton Seas End, once on the coast, is now six miles inland!
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.
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.
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 km˛) of reclaimed fertile agricultural land.
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: 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 (Gedney, Tydd, Walpole etc.)
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.
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.
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 guerrilla tactics in an attempt to stop the destruction of their way of life through the draining of the Fens.