In the late medieval period, people lived on the fen edge and the Townlands but the fens themselves were thinly populated. There were however, a few comparatively grand establishments called Halls, Neslam Hall at , for example. It was a grange of Sempringham Priory on the site of the modern Mornington House round which the district boundary is still diverted as it was when the abbey, on the Kesteven fen edge, owned it. There were more but still rather few smaller dwellings called cotes. Moors Cote lay in Bourne North Fen, to the south-east of Twenty and Guthram Cote stood on the boundary between Kesteven and Holland, on an island of Devensian deposits, the Abbey sand and gravel. The road book, Paterson's Roads, of 1826, lists a toll gate at Guthram Cote, a distance of from Bourne. Just to the east of this was the bridge over what it calls the South Forty-Foot Eau(15).