| Woolsthorpe by Colsterworth | |
Birth-place of Sir Isaac Newton |
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Woolsthorpe by Colsterworth
Woolsthorpe by Colsterworth shown within Lincolnshire |
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| OS grid reference | SK925244 |
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| Parish | Colsterworth |
| District | South Kesteven |
| Shire county | Lincolnshire |
| Region | East Midlands |
| Country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | Grantham |
| Postcode district | NG33 5 |
| Police | Lincolnshire |
| Fire | Lincolnshire |
| Ambulance | East Midlands |
| EU Parliament | East Midlands |
| UK Parliament | Grantham and Stamford (UK Parliament constituency) |
| List of places: UK • England • Lincolnshire | |
Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth is a hamlet in the South Kesteven district of Lincolnshire, England. It is probably best known as the birthplace of Sir Isaac Newton.
Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth is 94 miles (150 km) north of London, and half a mile (1 km) west of the A1 (one of the primary north-south roads of Great Britain. That road bypasses Colsterworth which grew up on the old Great North Road). The hamlet is two to three miles from the county boundary with Leicestershire and four from Rutland.
The hamlet now stands in rural surroundings but it is on the Lower Lincolnshire Limestone, below which are the Lower Estuarine Series and the Northampton sand of the Inferior Oolite Series of the Jurassic. The Northampton Sand here is cemented by iron and in the twentieth century the hamlet was almost surrounded by strip mining for the iron ore. This was the case in 1973 when the quarries closed with competition from the imported iron ore. It was in this year that the High Dyke branch line railway, opened in 1916 by the Great Northern Railway, closed. It lay to the north of the village and was used to carry the ore away. There was an unsuccessful attempt to preserve this line. The railway's bridge still spanned the A1 until it was removed in 2009 during junction improvements.
Woolsthorpe Manor, Newton's birthplace, is a typical seventeenth century yeoman farmer's limestone house with its later farmyard buildings. It is owned by the National Trust and is open to the public.
In the influential eighteenth century French encyclopedia Encyclopedie, the entry on Woolstrope-by-Colsterworth is almost entirely a biography of Newton,[1] this biography being so hidden because the editors of the Encyclopedie were ideologically opposed to biographies – see Great Man theory.