About the Village of Gunness [Gunhouse]

[The following was sent to me by Jon Adams, a current resident of the village of Gunness]:

There is as you can see a village called Gunness. This village is only a short distance from Althorpe where a great many of your marriage records are from.... The earliest map of a scale large enough to show churches, farms, windmills and pumphouses I have been able to locate and copy is 1887, when the village name was Gunhouse. The village changed its name to Gunness some time between 1883 and 1907....

The following information on the village was extracted from a document in the form of a book called Kelly's Almanac of 1933...:

GUNNESS (or Gunhouse) is a township and small village, pleasantly situated on the east bank of the river Trent and deriving its name from forming a ness or promontory in the river Trent: it has a station, for goods only, about half a mile distant on the South Yorkshire branch of the London and North Eastern railway, and is three-quarters of a mile from Althorpe station and 3 1/2 miles west from Scunthorpe on the same railway, 18 north from Gainsborough and 175 from London; it was formerly a chapelry in the parish of West Halton, but together with Burringham was formed into an ecclesiastical parish Oct. 15, 1861, from the ecclesiastical parishes of Bottesford, Frodingham and Crosby, and is in the Brigg division of the county, parts of Lindsey, north division of Manley wapentake, rural district of Glanford Brigg, county court district of Brigg, petty sessional division of Scunthorpe, rural deanery of Manlake, archdeaconry of Stow and diocese of Lincoln. The King George V Bridge, opened for railway and highway traffic May 21st 1916, crosses the Trent from Althorpe station to Gunness; it is a steel structure built by Sir William Arrol and Co. Ltd. and has a lifting span weighing 3,600 tons and 165 feet in length, operated by two electric motors of 115 h.p. each: the estimated cost was £3750,000. The church of St Barnabas is a small and plain edifice of brick in cement, in the Pointed style, consisting of chancel, nave, south porch and a belfry containing one bell: it was restored in 1902 and affords 60 sittings. The register dates from the year 1851. The living is a rectory, with Burringham annexed, joint net yearly value £3540, with residence, built in 1866, in the gift of the Bishop of London, and held since 1931 by the Rev. William Hubert Britton M.A. of Selwyn College, Cambridge. The Methodist chapel here was built in 1928, and another, in Gunhouse lane, in 1883. Here is a wharf and jetty for the shipment of iron ore, which is brought by rail from Frodingham, and at Neap is a staithe, or landing place, on the river Trent, for farm produce. Henry Wall esq. who is lord of the manor, and John Housham esq. are the principal landowners, but there are many small owners. The soil is alluvial; subsoil, warp. The chief crops are wheat, clover, oats and potatoes. The area of the ecclesiastical parish is 2,808 acres, of the township 491 acres of land, 62 of tidal water and 18 of foreshore; the population in 1921 was 102 in the township and in the ecclesiastical parish of Gunness-cum-Burringham, 1,077 (which includes parts of Brumby (Rural) and Flixborough civil parishes).

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