Stefan Buczacki - Earth to Earth: A Natural History of Churchyards

I consider myself fortunate in having grown up in a rural village Duffield in Derbyshire. On the outskirts of the ancient settlement is an imposing parish church with origins in the twelfth century and with its rare dedication one of only very few in the country to the Northumbrian prince St Alkmund. It is surrounded by an old graveyard alongside the River Derwent where I fished and whenever I walked past the graves I was always intrigued by the fact that so many of the headstones were unexpectedly made of slate, albeit that no slate quarries exist nearby.

Within the heart of the old village are the nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Baptist and Methodist churches, each with its own small graveyard, while on the north side of Duffield close to where The Chevin, the southernmost hill of the Pennines, begins to rise, is a beautifully sited nineteenth-century cemetery with two chapels overlooking the valley of the River Ecclesbourne, a tributary of the Derwent. As in most communities, wherever one walked, religious sites and burial grounds were never far away.

One of my earliest memories is of being taken by my mother to the old churchyard where she pointed out the nineteenth-century gravestones of some of her family forebears. As we entered we passed an ancient yew tree in whose hollow bole I and other children loved to hide. The tree is now gone, lost in a gale with only its massive ivy covered stump remaining but with a younger yew growing up nearby and with others not far away to take its place. In my childhood we also made regular visits to the cemetery where more of our ancestors are buried and where today my mother and father lie too.

My childhood experiences presaged a lifelong love of churchyards and burial grounds in general; but not for any morbid fascination. Rather for the way they encapsulate a communitys history and increasingly today for the way they can and in my view should offer sanctuary and refuge for our native wildlife; wildlife that is under constant threat in its original natural environment.

Whether or not you are spiritually and religiously motivated, churchyards cannot fail to appeal to anyone interested in local history and in the natural world, and I hope this essentially personal book will further stimulate that interest and encourage readers to seek more detailed information and perhaps assist in churchyard conservation themselves.

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly oer the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower,

The moping owl does to the moon complain,

Of such as wandring near her secret bower,

Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-trees shade,

Where heaves the turf in many a mouldring heap,

Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep

E LEGY W RITTEN IN A C OUNTRY CHURCHYARD, T HOMAS G RAY, 1751

Thus run the first few lines of one of the best known of all literary works or at least with one of the best known titles, though it must be an open question how many people can recite from memory more than the first verse! Gray was perhaps motivated by the churchyard of St Giles at Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, close to where he lived. In that churchyard his mother had been buried in 1749, two years before the formal publication of the Elegy, although the idea had been gestating for many years. However, the fact that Gray was inspired to write these beautiful lines one of the great poems of the English language and the fact that we are still familiar with it over 350 years later is testament to the way churchyards and all they represent have become entrenched in our collective national psyche.

While the country churchyard may be uniquely British, the special sanctity accorded the dead by practically every culture means burial sites have always held a unique place in the history of societies. From the earliest pagan burials to modern cemeteries and crematorium memorial gardens, they have enjoyed a special kind of devotion and protection.

In Britain, historical records and modern archaeology have exposed the existence of burial sites from the earliest days of human occupation. However these ancient burial grounds were scarcely graveyards as we would understand them today, the most simple being mere holes in the ground; the most spectacular relatively solitary but deeply impressive chambered tombs. The oldest proper British burial ground in the sense of a collection of graves seems to be the cave called Avelines Hole in the Somerset Mendips, which is of Early Mesolithic age dating from around 10,000 years ago and may once have contained the remains of up to one hundred individuals. It is a remarkable site because it was to be some 4,000 years later in the Early Neolithic period that comparable grave collections burial grounds became the norm.