The Benefit of Churchyards.

I took my lunch with me on my walk this morning, and stopped off at the old mediaeval church to eat it in the only spot which provided both shade and a place to sit.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for old churchyards before. Some people find them morbid and a little repellent because they’re all about death. I don’t, and I think the majority would agree that they’re peaceful and characterful with a charm all their own. Ironically, however, it’s their very connection with death which makes them such grounding places.

If you walk around an old churchyard reading the inscriptions on the headstones, you inevitably come across family connections relating to those who have lived in the area for many generations. (In my churchyard, for example, there are Princes all over the place going back two centuries and more.) And in reading the details you can piece together little bits of information which tell you something about the person whose remains now lie just a little way beneath your feet. This woman, for example, was widowed at age 45, and lived to be 91. Another died in her teens and was obviously the younger sister of an elderly woman who still lives here. And of course, there is the lady Isabella, aged 28, who died just a week after her daughter was born.

And this is the point of it all: forget the emphasis on life everlasting – which may or may not be a fact – and see them as a sure and certain mirror to what life, living and dying are all about as we strut and shuffle our mortal coil through the experience of being physical. Through all the myriad doings and aspirings and wonderings and feelings encountered in the process, mortality stands as the one great constant which none of us can escape. That’s why churchyards are so grounding, and that’s why I find them havens of calm in a crazy, troubled world.