in 1883, which is of Gothic style, previously seated 300 and closed in 1998. An earlier Methodist chapel, beside it, became a Sunday school. A former public primary school on Branston High Street was built in 1873, and preceded by a fee-paying school on Hall Lane, built in 1837. Opposite the church still stands a blacksmith's forge. Two other public houses were once located in the village; The Plough which stood on the High Street opposite the Waggon and Horses, which was demolished in the 1970s to straighten a dangerous bend at the centre of the village, and the Bertie Arms, a small public house on Hall Lane, long ago converted into a private dwelling. The Bertie Arms was named after the family which built Branston old hall. The building now occupied by the Home Guard Club was formerly a hops store. 19th Century communal water pumps have been preserved on Hall Lane and Waterwheel Lane. The village used to have a railway station which was in the parish of Heighington. Before then, Station Road was called Heighington Road. Silver Street was formerly known as Bleak Street. A war memorial to men of the parish killed in the First World War was erected on the village green in 1920. The civil parish of Branston was merged with that of Mere to form the present unit in 1931. In the early 1930s parish occupations included twenty-one farmers and one smallholder, two poultry breeders, a horse dealer, a haulage contractor, two coal dealers, a motor bus proprietor, a cycle dealer, a fried fish dealer, three blacksmiths, a wheelwright, a plumber, two carpenters, a boot maker, two butchers, two grocers, three shopkeepers, two tailors, one of whom ran the post office, and four pub landlords. Abel Smith Gardens was built on former allotments. In July 1977 more than fifty children from the junior school had to go to Lincoln County Hospital after a crop spraying aircraft inadvertently sprayed their playground. The insecticide was a mixture of meta-systox and aphox; organophosphate and carbamate compounds designed to clear crops of aphids. A hotel called Moor Lodge Hotel stood on Moor Lane until it was recently demolished to make way for housing. Geography and ecology Most of the village is around above sea level. It is built around the shallow valleys of three limestone streams which originate within of the village, at Westfield Farm, at Mere