Visit graveyards

Put life into perspective, by making time for a cemetery visit.

It’s a fine English summer day in the ancient Wiltshire village of Ebbesbourne Wake. Just up the hill before The Horseshoe Inn a turnoff takes me to St John the Baptist Church, built not long after the Norman Conquest and crowned with a bell tower sometime in the Middle Ages.

Running along the side of the church and clambering up a slight slope is an unkempt graveyard with a few leaning gravestones. It is edged with a shelterbelt of rowan trees, hawthorns, field maples and yews. The air smells sweetly of flowering privets. Ox-eye daisies and dandelions sparkle in the long grass. House martins swoop for tiny flies overhead. The music of a song thrush cuts through the afternoon.

Some of the forgotten graves have inscriptions that are almost worn away, but other tombstones are newer. One is fronted with pink carnations.

I note the grave of Jacqueline, ‘taken tragically’ on the 20^th November 1982, aged just 17. Another marks the spot where Susan was laid to rest in November 1986. She was only 28. Then there’s Edna, who died in January 1957, aged 40. Elizabeth was buried here in 1944, aged 52, while Eric died in 1982 at 65, and William in 1954, aged 61.

Different years. Different ages. A silent crowd in the dirt below. Like any graveyard, anywhere.

I’m especially touched when I see the gravestones of babies and children, and adults far younger than me who missed out on decades of experiences that they could have had.

I almost always manage to find someone who died at the same age that I am in a cemetary, which is always strange. Once, in London’s Highgate Cemetery, I even found a grave with my own name on it.

It read: ‘Here lies the body of Marc Llewellyn’.

I wish I’d taken a photo of it, so that I could pin it above my desk to remind me that I need to make the most of things while I can.

I seek out cemeteries wherever I am in the world. When I inspect the names on the gravestones it puts things into a sharper focus. They tell me that I will die too. That I can be here one moment and gone the next, just like that.

As an aside: On a recent visit to St Michael’s Church in Bosherston in rural Pembrokeshire, Wales, I came around the corner of the building and found my 11-year-old son jumping on a concrete slab that marked a grave. My other son, aged 13, was laying on his stomach with an arm deep in the ground beneath another slab, which was cracked and badly broken. He was searching ‘for bones’, he told me.

I liked their innocence, but I told them off anyway.

Image credit: Garden State Hiker/flickr