Tombstone Tales

Although our village predates its mediaeval priory, since the twelfth century the  priory has been at its centre and thus the current kirk and graveyard is  not on some distant edge but right in the middle of the community.  The dead centre -  to resurrect a hoary old pun .

Shoppers, dog walkers, school children, use the cemetery as a shortcut, making their way through what was once the nave and transepts  of a mighty ecclesiastical foundation and is now the last resting place of the local populace. 
I watched a television programme that explored the burial practices of the Bronze Age tomb builders and it seems they kept their ancestors' bones very much in the community.   Our graveyard is a bit like that. As I collect my morning paper, although I have no ancestors there, I pass old acquaintances and neighbours and see stones that tell of four generations occupying the same farm.
The headstones are sometimes a tale in themselves, a couple who lived into their seventies yet were predeceased by all of their four children who died in infancy and early childhood.  A life of perhaps fifty years of unremitting sadness.   Another tells of a young surgeon to the Nabob of the Carnatic who died in the Neilgarry (sic) Hills working for the East India Company at the start of the Raj and yet another of the life of a missionary in Calabar.

Fascinating places, cemeteries, always with a story to spark your interest, an oddity, a connection or sometimes a wry memorandum to the living.

A trip to Edinburgh to collect my rebound copy of my predecessor’s  local history  ( Blog 27 Jan 2014)  gave me an opportunity to wander about in St Cuthberts Churchyard where the great and the good of Auld Reekie were laid to rest  including George Kemp, designer of the Scott Monument. His Neo-Gothic rocket ship on Princes Street is in a better state than his algae green tombstone.

Kemp's headstone

The stones  speak of desperate efforts to claim a place for posterity, detailing the merits and successes of the departed  There are surgeons and physicians; businessmen and merchants of every trade, bookseller, engraver, ironmonger, iron founder, baker; army officers from the days of empire and their deaths in far off outposts; and ministers of religion whose tombs are amongst the biggest with the most effusive eulogies carved thereon, their desire for immortality on this earthly plane outweighing the risks of condemnation for the sins of pride and vanity.

Soot-blackened, moss-covered and algae-stained, ignored and forgotten, the stones are a testimony to the often futile desire to be remembered.

Can storied urn or animated bust
 Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath
Can honour’s voice provoke the silent dust
 Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death

 Amongst all this self-aggrandisement is one stone detailing only the birthplace and date of death of St Cuthberts most noted inhabitant. 

A man confident in his own abilities in life, he has nothing on his gravestone to trumpet his achievements.

Thomas Penson De Quincy, writer, essayist, journalist, philosopher, translator, classicist- at fifteen, his schoolmaster said of him “that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than I could address an English one” - and original exponent of what might be called addiction literature. He was a friend, and occasional critic of, Wordsworth, Coleridge, another opium user, and Lamb
His Confessions of an English Opium Eater has never been out of print.
His essays are still immensely readable. The most well known are
 On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth
On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
Suspiria de Profundis
 Novels, stories, reminisences, journalism, treatises, all flowed from his pen
 His passing remarks on politicians, economists, Ireland,  Lake district visitors, and suicide have a bite of truth.

His friendship with John Wilson (“Christopher North”) whom he met at Oxford, brought him to the Edinburgh literary scene where he met James Hogg and, eventually, Thomas Carlyle.  He moved to Edinburgh but his chaotic finances caused him to seek debtors sanctuary in HolyRood Park.
 In the last years of his life, his finances improved and his collected works were published in America.
 He immediately influenced  Poe, Baudelaire and Gogol and later, writers such as Aldous Huxley and William Burroughs.  George Luis Borges claimed to have been influenced by his work
Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique owes much to the Confessions of an Opium Eater

His headstone simply gives the date and place of his and his wife’s birth and death, nothing else.
 His writings stand on their own merits, the perfect  memorial.