Quarrington is a village and former civil parish, now part of the civil parish of Sleaford, in the North Kesteven district of Lincolnshire, England. The old village and its church lie approximately 1 miles (2 km) south-west from the centre of Sleaford. Suburban housing developments at New Quarrington and Quarrington Hill effectively link the two settlements. Bypassed by the A15, it is connected to Lincoln and Peterborough, as well as Newark and King's Lynn (via the A17). At the 2011 census, Quarrington and Mareham ward, which incorporates most of the settlement, had an estimated population of 7,046.
Quarrington was a rural community during the early and middle Anglo-Saxon period while mills along the River Slea in the Middle Ages gave the village its likely alternative name of Millthorpe. The Bishop of Lincoln and Ramsey Abbey held manors in Quarrington after the Norman Conquest, but the Carre family of Sleaford were the principal land-owners between 1559 and 1683, when its estate passed by marriage to the Marquesses of Bristol. Although the growth of Victorian Sleaford saw the town encroach into the parish's boundaries, the old village remained a small cluster of farm buildings and cottages for much of its history. The sale of most of the surrounding farmland by successive Marquesses of Bristol in the late 20th century led to the rapid development of residential estates on Quarrington Hill and in New Quarrington which have engulfed the original settlement. Low crime rates, affordable housing, high standards of living and access to good schools have attracted home-buyers to the area, contributing to a sharp rise in the population.
The medieval St Botolph's Church, a grade II* listed building, lies at the heart of the old village and remains a hub for the Anglican community. The village's primary school serves local children, who continue their secondary education in one of Sleaford's three secondary schools. The nearest railway station on the Grantham to Skegness and Peterborough to Lincoln lines is in Sleaford. In the 19th century, the most common employment was in agriculture and more than half of the village's population were farm labourers. By 2011, most residents were employed in the wholesale and retail trades, public administration and defence, human health and social work, and manufacturing.
History
Early
Scattered Palaeolithic and Bronze Age materials have been discovered in and around Quarrington but while nearby Old Sleaford is known to have been settled in the Iron Age and occupied by the Romans, there is little evidence for sustained pre-Saxon settlement at Quarrington.
Medieval
Between 1992 and 1995, archaeologists evaluating 34 trenches across 13 hectares of land around the village uncovered 56 ditches or gullies, a number of postholes, a large collection of pottery sherds and "extremely rare" evidence of metalworking from the 6th–7th centuries. The site has been dated to the 5th–9th centuries, representing an early and middle Anglo-Saxon settlement. Although noted for its metalworking and its size, the archaeologists concluded that it "displayed all the signs of a typical rural community", reflecting how "the vast majority" of the Anglo-Saxon population lived. Analysis of animal bones revealed that sheep-farming increasingly replaced pig-rearing at the site during this period. The pottery found at the site suggests that Quarrington had a strong, southern trade network; in the early Anglo-Saxon period this network encompassed Lincolnshire and Leicestershire, while pottery from Northamptonshire was prevalent in the middle Saxon period. A small early Anglo-Saxon cemetery containing inhumations was uncovered in the parish in 2000.
Quarrington's medieval name was recorded in the Domesday Book (1086) as Corninctune or Cornunctone, from the Old English cweorn ("mill") and tun ("homestead"), meaning "miller's homestead", reflecting the importance of the watermills which were built along the River Slea. Bardi, one of the pre-conquest landowners at Quarrington, had owned 10 mills in Sleaford and Quarrington in 1066, and the 11 or 12 in existence by 1086 represents the largest cluster of mills in Lincolnshire. The archaeologists and historians Christine Mahany and David Roffe suggest that Quarrington was a specialised part of Bardi's compact estate, geared in particular to milling. The historian John Blair has speculated that this specialised function may have been associated with an earlier monastic estate centred on Sleaford, also suggested by the grid-aligned 7th- and 8th-century ditches uncovered at Quarrington during the 1990s excavations and by evidence of later grain-processing at Sleaford.