Local legend around the North Lincolnshire village of Kirmington tells of a battle fought during the English Civil Wars at nearby Micklow Hill, a clash between Parliamentary and Royalist forces, though it is worth noting plainly that no firm historical evidence actually confirms a real skirmish ever took place there at all. According to the story regardless, a Royalist soldier, disembowelled and mortally wounded in whatever fighting did occur, tried desperately to reach Kirmington for help, passing through a gap in a hedge and crossing what is now Caistor Road before finally dying just short of reaching the safety of the village itself.
A single surviving couplet, said to come from an old folk song composed about the encounter, has been passed down alongside the story: "From Micklow Hill to Gibbery Gap / He carried his puddings in his cap," using the old regional dialect word puddings for entrails, a grimly matter-of-fact piece of folk verse describing the soldier's desperate, doomed final journey.
Two distinct beliefs have survived alongside this rhyme through the generations since: first, that nothing will grow at the exact spot where the dying soldier crossed through the hedge, the ground itself apparently marked permanently by his suffering, and second, that his ghost can still be seen staggering through the hedgerow at Gibbery Gap even now, endlessly repeating his final, failed attempt to reach help before his wounds finally overcame him.
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