Out and About 8th September 2019
Boston - Fishtoft
Boston - Fishtoft
The Pilgrim Fathers Memorial is a small granite marker on the banks of the River Haven at Fishtoft in Lincolnshire. It commemorates part of the journey of the Pilgrim Fathers, a small group of people who took to the sea in search of religious freedom. Contrary to what is commonly thought, the Pilgrim Fathers, those people from Gainsborough, and Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, did not board the Mayflower in Lincolnshire and sail to the New World instead they were betrayed, arrested, imprisoned and tried here in a Boston, it was only later that they reached their original destination of Leiden in the Netherlands.
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The memorial, I think, is a disappointment to some visitors ‘This is not a memorial to a place the pilgrim fathers sailed from, it’s a memorial to where they didn't sail from. Well, why have it then?’ asked one person. Is that a fair comment or not?
The thing is, we all fall into the trap of seeing events in history as a scene from an epic film, there are no square-rigged sailing ships here and no simply dressed puritans looking towards heaven. When what we see is not what we’re expecting we’re disappointed, but we shouldn’t be. No matter how small a piece of history is, it needs to be remembered and marked, we don’t need films, we need memorials to spark our imagination and to make us ask questions. So yes that’s why this marker is here.
The thing is, we all fall into the trap of seeing events in history as a scene from an epic film, there are no square-rigged sailing ships here and no simply dressed puritans looking towards heaven. When what we see is not what we’re expecting we’re disappointed, but we shouldn’t be. No matter how small a piece of history is, it needs to be remembered and marked, we don’t need films, we need memorials to spark our imagination and to make us ask questions. So yes that’s why this marker is here.
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