In the village where we used to live, the churchyard was just over the road from our cul-de-sac. I often used to potter around on my lunchbreaks, or pass through on walks. The oldest gravestone I managed to find, if I remember correctly, was for a local chap who had died in his seventies around the year 1750, which meant that he had been born towards the end of the reign of Charles II, some three hundred years before my own birth.
There is a quiet consolation in the long continuity of communities
There was a strange comfort in thinking that the man whose mortal remains lay – or had once lain – beneath my feet had walked the same hills and fields as me, had known the same church and the same valley. No doubt he had wondered, each November, whether the intermittent stream would flow that winter, as we did in our years there.
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