Louth Museum

Louth Museum sits in the heart of a historic Lincolnshire market town, a few streets back from the wide market place. The building holds four galleries, a small library that also hosts exhibitions, and a gift shop at the front. It stands on Broadbank, a quiet road close to the Lincolnshire Wolds. The museum was designed in 1910 by John James Cresswell for the society that has run it since 1910. Charles Smith Carter, a boot-maker turned archaeologist, became its first and longest-serving curator. The museum’s displays reach back 200,000 years through local archaeology and history. Among its treasures is the largest national collection of woodcarvings by Thomas Wilkinson Wallis, a Victorian sculptor known for lifelike birds and foliage. Wallis won medals at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Paris Exhibition of 1855, and John Ruskin praised his work. The museum also owns Keal’s Gibbet, a cage that once held the body of a convicted murderer in 1731. A panorama gallery shows two back-lit copies of William Brown’s 1844 view from St James’ spire. Visitors walk through rooms filled with fossils, Roman finds, and displays on brick-making and flat-weave carpets. The woodcarving gallery shows Wallis’s method: a clay model on wire frames, then a single block of limewood. ‘Trophy of Spring’, carved over eight months, stands five feet high in an earthquake-proof case. The library space hosts changing exhibitions alongside books on local history. Outside, the town’s market place and the Wolds provide a quiet setting for a day’s exploration.