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Elegy in a Yorkshire churchyard Elegy in a Yorkshire churchyard
(about 2 hours later)
The graveyard around the two churches of Heptonstall is reputed to contain 100,000 bodies, which is about the population of Halifax; a silent city of the dead, squeezed into an area about the size of a playing field.The graveyard around the two churches of Heptonstall is reputed to contain 100,000 bodies, which is about the population of Halifax; a silent city of the dead, squeezed into an area about the size of a playing field.
Weather-wise, it is a day of nothings; windless, tepid and grey as gritstone. Ted Hughes described the surrounding moors as “a stage for the performance of heaven”, but today it feels like that performance would be uninspiring, so I opt to linger in the village and explore.Weather-wise, it is a day of nothings; windless, tepid and grey as gritstone. Ted Hughes described the surrounding moors as “a stage for the performance of heaven”, but today it feels like that performance would be uninspiring, so I opt to linger in the village and explore.
Heptonstall’s dead are crammed together under heavy slabs of millstone grit, a legacy of the days before people properly understood decomposition (the graveyard of nearby Haworth infamously “leaked” its contents into the water supply). You have to walk over a packed paving of graves to enter the Old Church, which makes me feel squeamish, but the villagers take a pragmatic view of such things. Nearby, a house has a back garden full of cheerily typical English outdoor furniture – pot plants, benches, a table and chairs – arranged on ground entirely made of graves. Richard, a local handyman staffing the adjacent museum this afternoon, tells me of a Heptonstall family who used the gravestones of their ancestors as windowsills. I suppose the dead don’t mind.Heptonstall’s dead are crammed together under heavy slabs of millstone grit, a legacy of the days before people properly understood decomposition (the graveyard of nearby Haworth infamously “leaked” its contents into the water supply). You have to walk over a packed paving of graves to enter the Old Church, which makes me feel squeamish, but the villagers take a pragmatic view of such things. Nearby, a house has a back garden full of cheerily typical English outdoor furniture – pot plants, benches, a table and chairs – arranged on ground entirely made of graves. Richard, a local handyman staffing the adjacent museum this afternoon, tells me of a Heptonstall family who used the gravestones of their ancestors as windowsills. I suppose the dead don’t mind.
Among these thousands of commemorated lives, many visitors coming here seek just one. Sylvia Plath is buried in the “new” graveyard nearby, which today is unkempt with a summer’s worth of overgrowth, the pink spires of rosebay willowherb just beginning to succumb to the new season.Among these thousands of commemorated lives, many visitors coming here seek just one. Sylvia Plath is buried in the “new” graveyard nearby, which today is unkempt with a summer’s worth of overgrowth, the pink spires of rosebay willowherb just beginning to succumb to the new season.
Heptonstall churchyard was the spiritual navel of her erstwhile husband Ted Hughes’s 1979 Remains of Elmet poem sequence, which climaxes with a dream in which the moon crashed into Calderdale and “black Halifax boiled in phosphorus”. From the resulting crater emerges a vast destroying angel, which sweeps over the moors, an augury of the death and rebirth of the industrial civilisation of the West Riding.Heptonstall churchyard was the spiritual navel of her erstwhile husband Ted Hughes’s 1979 Remains of Elmet poem sequence, which climaxes with a dream in which the moon crashed into Calderdale and “black Halifax boiled in phosphorus”. From the resulting crater emerges a vast destroying angel, which sweeps over the moors, an augury of the death and rebirth of the industrial civilisation of the West Riding.
But the prophetic and the personal are closely intertwined, especially when you see the words inscribed on Plath’s grave: “Even amidst fierce flames / The golden lotus can be planted.”But the prophetic and the personal are closely intertwined, especially when you see the words inscribed on Plath’s grave: “Even amidst fierce flames / The golden lotus can be planted.”
Carey Davies @carey_davies