The churchyard

The churchyard

Burials in the churchyard alongside the Abbey Church in Bourne ended in 1855 when the town cemetery was opened. There was no more space and some plots had been used two and three times for interments with bodies stacked one upon the other, making the erection of tombstones for each one a difficult task.

In the 150 years that have elapsed, the churchyard has been given less and less care and maintenance and today it is barely tidy, the grass infrequently cut and there is litter lying around, especially in the more remote parts.

The popularity of our country churchyards is not in doubt for although few may attend services in church, one only has to inspect the Visitors' Book to see that there is a constant flow of people dropping in, often on the off chance but more frequently by design, to inspect the place where their ancestors worshipped, married, were baptised or buried, and to take away with them a memory of that occasion. This is the last resting place of those great and good people who helped build this town and yet they are mainly forgotten, and that is the pity for all were important in some way because only the wealthy could afford a tombstone.

The burial ground is a quiet and secluded spot, just a short step from the busy town centre, and it could, with some care, become a place that people would seek out to sit and contemplate on their lives and on those who went before, for what better place to find peace and quiet than in a graveyard.

A secluded corner of the churchyard at Bourne with a magnificent stone sarcophagus (right) erected by one of the town's oldest families to Elizabeth Mawby who died on 5th April 1856 at the age of 62 but is not buried here. The tombstone was placed there in her memory, as was the tradition, but there is no body underneath and it was taken instead to the newly opened cemetery in South Street where it was laid to rest on 10th April 1856. The memorial also remembers her brother John Mawby who died on 26th January 1857 at the age of 49 and who was also buried in the cemetery.

But most of the graves here are neglected and overgrown, and the saddest thing is that the once grand tombstones, some elaborately carved although there are many more modest ones made of slate and sculpted in simple lettering, are totally neglected, covered in ivy and lichen, often leaning and sometimes crumbling, while others have collapsed altogether, but still bearing the names of those who went before, made their mark and passed on into oblivion, remembered only by a few words remaining that fade with the years.

One of the ancient tombstones contains a curious epitaph, slowly eroding, on Thomas Tye, a blacksmith, the first six lines of which are also found on a gravestone in Haltham churchyard near Horncastle in Lincolnshire:

My sledge and hammer lie reclined,

My bellows too have lost their wind,

My fire's extinct, my forge decayed,

And in the dust my vice is laid,

My coal is spent, my iron's gone,

My nails are drawn, my work is done,

My fire-dryed corpse lies here at rest,

My soul like smoke is soaring to the bles't.

Another interesting inscription can be found on the memorial stone for Thomas Knott, who died on 7th July 1832, aged 48 years:

Afflictions some long time he bore

Physicians were in vain

Till God did please to give me ease

And free me from my pain.

The church graveyard is a constant reminder of the feeble grasp we all have on life and the fleeting impression we make while we are here. Gray's Elegy is one of the most evocative poems of the English countryside ever written and it is a constant delight to read his lines and conjure up the picture of the churchyard at Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire that gave him his inspiration and where he now lies buried. The success of this poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751, made Thomas Gray the foremost poet of his day and it has been in continuous print ever since.

One verse particularly, has a relevance to the churchyard here in Bourne:

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

WISE WORDS FROM THE PAST

This slate memorial which can be found in a corner of the churchyard was erected to the memory of Benjamin Ferraby who died on 30th October 1838 at the age of 50, and his wife Mary who died on 17th November 1834, aged 53. It also contains an inscription that is still relevant today:

Praise wrote on tombs is often vainly spent

The honest man is his own monument.