Churchyards. I’ve been in a lot of them in my time and mostly I can concur with the narrator of Samuel Beckett’s First Love, ‘Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.’ I’ve known churchyards where grass grew knee-high, and others mown to within a millimetre of their lives; churchyards in Leicestershire full of elegantly cut slate gravestones and ones in the Cotswolds populated by tombs made of glowing oolitic limestone; I’ve been in churchyards so deserted and unkempt that my only company was a furtive rat scuttling into a crack in the side of a table tomb; I’ve been in a churchyard when sheep were grazing there and in another where a young man in gaiters and tweeds looked like a ghost from the 1920s as he swept leaves in the midge-haunted twilight. In all of these, save perhaps the one with the rat, I’ve taken the air willingly. There are many beautiful and engaging churchyards, and they spark our admiration in all kinds of different ways.
My photograph shows one that I admired very much. It’s at Kirkburn, East Yorkshire, near Driffield, north of Beverley. What I love about this place is that part of the churchyard has been set aside as a haven for wildflowers together with the insects and other animals that find food or shelter in such a place. It’s a part of God’s acre that contains old and often illegible stones, so not an area that many people will want to access – most visitors, I hope, will like me be happy to keep to the pathways. I’m sure most people will find heartwarming the sight of ox-eye daisies, knapweed, buttercups, and – yes! – a pyramidal orchid, among other things. Bees and other pollinators will be more happy still.
I didn’t realise when I was in Kirkburn, looking mostly at Norman architecture and carving, that it’s set in an area with a lot of intensive farming. This fact makes even this small bit of nature conservation more worthwhile still. CPRE North and East Yorkshire reports that species lists for the churchyard are growing, and remarks that Kirkburn’s was the only church they visited with a Pipistrelle dropping on the church door!† This is progress, although one hopes that the bats do not pose too many of their own in the context of the ancient church building. The approach wouldn’t work in every churchyard, but if just a few thousand of England’s 16,000 or so parish churches could set aside an area like this, what a benefit it would be to the environment.
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* Most of my churchyard blog posts have been about things (gravestones, buildings, walls) in churchyards, but for nature, see my picture of ox-eye daisies at Bradford-on-Avon; and for another way to enjoy churchyards, see my thoughts on a picnic (and other things) in Tixover.
† See their website here for a report on their church visits. It’s to the CPRE that I owe the information about local intensive farming.
