More of the churchyard

I'm not usually creeped out by graveyards, but I admit that knowing the history makes this cemetery seem very creepy indeed.

And the wind didn't help, blasting through the trees and around the gravestones, freezing my hands like Cathy's ghost in Wuthering Heights, even though it was rather warm the days I was in Haworth.

The churchyard

This is very different from the one the Brontës knew, and that's a good thing. Patrick Brontë had fought for many years to improve sanitation in Haworth; in 1838 the average age of death was 19 years, as bad as the worst slums in London. The local property owners fought him for years because they didn't want to pay higher taxes for improvements, but in 1850 the national Board of Health finally sent an inspector, Benjamin Herschel Babbage. His report found that in addition to a shocking shortage of toilets—69 for 2500 people—and the resulting overflow of sewage, the village's water was also being polluted by the graveyard. It sat uphill from the village, and material from decomposing bodies ran directly into the water supply. There were annual outbreaks of typhoid, as well as cholera and dysentery. (Ironically, this wasn't an issue at the parsonage; it was on the other side of the churchyard from the village, and had its own well. Unfortunately, clean water didn't protect them from tuberculosis.)

After the Babbage report, headstones which had previously been laid flat on the ground, preventing natural decomposition from taking place, were pulled upright. Trees were also planted then—there were no trees when the Brontës lived there—so their roots could help purify the contaminated soil.

From Haworth Parsonage to the church

Okay, the path to the church did lead past the graveyard, so there was always that Victorian memento mori going on (not that anyone was likely to forget that in Haworth, which had a shockingly low life expectancy compared to similar villages in Yorkshire) but I did think the sign marking where the gate had been was unnecessarily morbid. It could have just stopped with noting that it was the site of the gate used by the Brontë family, and left off the “through which they were carried to their final resting place in the church.”

St Michael and All Angels

The church in Haworth was rebuilt in the late 1800's; only the tower remains from the original medieval church. Patrick Brontë was the minister here for more than 40 years, until his own death in 1861. He outlived all six of his children.

St Michael graveyard

I always love old churchyards.

Mistaken identity at Clava Cairns

This was one of the pictures I'd never processed—me walking next to the main cairn.

I didn't really look that closely at it, apart from wondering whatever happened to the bag I was carrying since I don't remember it at all.

Then it occurred to me: Wait, who took this picture? I was there alone; the driver I'd hired for the afternoon was waiting for me outside the park. I realized that this wasn't me, this was some other woman with baggy jeans and a gray hoodie and a camera around her neck. (You can also see her off to the side in the previous picture of the cairn.) But I honestly thought it was a picture of me.

I found another picture from that day, obviously taken by the driver, and I was wearing a red jacket, not a gray one.

The jeans, alas, were just as unfortunate.

Flashback: Clava Cairns

The most famous of a group of cairns around Inverness. I posted pictures at the time (here, here, and here) but here's another that really shows the ring of standing stones around the cairn.

All Saints

This 12th century church was around the corner from the inn in Faringdon. I wasn't able to go inside, but I did like that headstone about to topple into the path, and the oddly jaunty pennants over the graveyard.

The church lost its spire to a Royalist cannonball during the English Civil War, and I'm not sure why they haven't built another in the almost 400 years since. Maybe it's just the cachet of being able to say Cromwell did that, as two different residents asked me if I'd seen the church and told me about the cannonball during my brief time walking around the town.

Shackleton and Wild

Scott for scientific method, Amundsen for speed and efficiency but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton—Sir Raymond Priestly

The rather grandly named Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-16 is more commonly referred to by the name of the ship, the Endurance. There isn't any part of it that I don't find astonishing, especially now that I am actually in this part of the world and have seen the mountains of South Georgia that Shackleton, Worsley, and Crean crossed on foot, half-starved, with screws in the soles of their shoes for traction. (And having just made the very unpleasant crossing from South Georgia to Elephant Island in a big ship instead of a 22-foot lifeboat.)

In 1922, Shackleton was back in South Georgia preparing for yet another expedition, when he died of a heart attack at 47. Plans were originally made to return his body to England, but his widow requested that he be buried in South Georgia. Grytviken was a busy whaling station then, but it's still as remote a location as you can imagine. The expedition's doctor, Alexander Macklin, wrote, “I think this is as the boss would have had it himself, standing lonely on an island far from civilization, surrounded by a stormy tempestuous sea, and in the vicinity of one of his greatest exploits.”

Frank Wild, who was left in charge of the remaining Endurance crew on Elephant Island for more than four months after Shackleton set off in the James Caird, surviving on seal, penguin, and seaweed, died in South Africa in 1939 at the age of 66. In 2011, his ashes were moved to Grytviken, and buried next to Shackleton.

The ship's crew supplied whiskey for the traditional toast at the grave and I even drank a little of it.

Back to Lower Slaughter

Since I'm here in blogland, let's take a quick visit back to Lower Slaughter in the Cotswolds, and the picturesque church of St Mary's.

The Mitfords

St Mary's was the parish church of the famous Mitford sisters, four of whom are buried in the churchyard. The tombstones are so weathered they can hardly be read, but that's a closeup of the novelist (or “Authoress”) Nancy Mitford's grave on the left. The picture on the right shows the graves of Nancy, the Hitler-stalking Unity, and the vile Diana.

I had to check Wikipedia when I got home to confirm that Unity's middle name had really been Valkyrie, and that it wasn't just some affectation she had adapted after becoming obsessed with Hitler. Not only was that really her name, but she was apparently conceived in a town called Swastika, in Ontario, while her parents were investigating a local gold mine as a possible investment.

A perfect English country church

St Mary's church in Swinbrook is quite small; it's hard to imagine more than forty or fifty parishioners being able to comfortably sit in the pews. Most of the building dates from the 12th or 13th century, except for a tower added in the 1800's. That large plain glass window is very striking, and I love how much light it lets into the interior. (The panes of glass were blown out by a land mine in 1940, but the medieval glass was collected and incorporated into another window.)

Finishing off in color

Finally, here are a couple of pictures in color, so you can see how green the cemetery is. The sections that are still overgrown are positively jungly.

Two angels

The Rossettis

This is the grave of the poet Christina Rossetti and most of her family, who were apparently just stacked on top of each other.

Missing is Christina's brother, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had reportedly insisted that he not be buried in Highgate; he is instead buried in Kent, where he died in 1882. His wife, Elizabeth Siddal, who died twenty years earlier after only two years of marriage, is buried with the family though, and that may be one reason he didn't want to be buried there.

Lizzie Siddal was model and muse to several of the Pre-Raphaelites (most famously posing as Ophelia for Millais—taking laudanum for the pneumonia she caught after posing in a bathtub full of cold water for hours may have started the addiction that eventually cost her her life.)

She was a poet and painter in her own right, and though she was probably less talented than her husband, and certainly less accomplished, honestly I find her much more interesting as a person. It will probably not come as a surprise to learn that he treated her badly—he was chronically unfaithful, and the Rossetti family's disapproval of her working class background kept him from marrying her, although they first became engaged ten years before they actually married. By then her health had deteriorated to the point that she had to be carried to the church. She became pregnant, but the child was stillborn. During a subsequent pregnancy she died from an overdose of laudanum, though whether it was an accident or suicide isn't clear.

After her death, Rossetti was so consumed with grief that he refused to let her coffin leave the apartment for six days, and he enclosed the only copy of a manuscript of his poems in the casket, wrapped in her long red hair.

This is where the story takes a macabre turn. By 1869, seven years after her death, Rossetti became convinced he was losing his eyesight, and wanted to focus on his poetry rather than painting. The problem was that the poems he considered the best he'd ever written were buried with Lizzie in Highgate. His business manager, Charles Augustus Howell, arranged for a secret exhumation. The book was retrieved, and Howell reported to Rossetti—who wasn't there—that Lizzie was perfectly preserved, and that her red hair had continued to grow and now filled the coffin. Howell almost certainly made all of that up in an attempt to ease Rossetti's guilt, but Lizzie received some poetic justice—literally. The poems were published, along with newer work, to a scathingly negative critical reception. Rossetti regretted having agreed to the exhumation for the rest of his life (as well he should) and the man who facilitated it for him, Howell, ended up dying with his throat cut in a Chelsea pub.

These are some lines from the last poem Siddal wrote:

Life and night are falling from me,
Death and day are opening on me,
Wherever my footsteps come and go,
Life is a stony way of woe.
Lord have I long to go?

Hallow hearts are ever near me,
Soulless eyes have ceased to cheer me:
Lord, may I come to thee?

Life and youth and summer weather
To my heart no joy can gather.
Lord lift me from life’s stony way!
Loved eyes long close in death watch for me:
Holy death is waiting for me –
Lord, may I come to-day?

Compare and contrast

One of the sections of well-maintained graves and monuments, and a jumble of headstones under the trees.

The pelican memorial

One more filtered image: the grave of Baroness Elizabeth de Munck, who died in 1841. The carving on the stone shows a pelican feeding her chicks with her own blood, a common heraldic device, and was probably commissioned by the Baroness's daughter, Maria, who was a well-known opera singer.

One more view

There's unfortunately no sense of proportion in these photos, but that big standing stone was much taller than I am.

Inside the cairn

View looking over the top of the main cairn, and from inside. The stones are much taller than they appear in this picture; they were over my head.

Clava cairns

There are about 50 of these cairns around Inverness, with these three at Balnuaran of Clava the most famous, so they're all called Clava cairns.

They were used for burial, with the entrance to the cairn oriented to the setting sun in midwinter, and each only held one or two bodies. They're about 4000 years old so the bodies are long gone; what's left are three enormous circles of rock, each surrounded by a ring of standing stones.

Especially on a sunny day, it just seems so incongruous. It's a quiet park at the end of a peaceful country road, with lawns and trees -- a place where you might bring the kids for a picnic. Well, except for those Bronze Age tombs.