Dewlish

[puddleshark]

Dewlish Churchyard





Making a circuit, deosil, of the churchyard at Dewlish, I came across something unexpected, tucked away behind the church:


Marble angels! Not something you see very often in a Dorset churchyard. Commemorating various members of the Frankfort de Montmorency family, Irish peers, whose coat of arms features two angels.




Dorset churchyard memorials of a more typical variety.




A very early headstone. The inscription reads:
Here lyeth The Body
of Samuel Ademes
who decesed Nov
ember the 2 Anno Donn 1673
Awacke[?] And Sing Thou
that Dyeth







All Saints, Dewlish. I mean to make a return visit to photograph the interior one day. There are some nice Norman doorways, though the rest of the interior was heavily restored in the 19th century.

From the church, there's a footpath that leads across the fields towards the park of Dewlish House.




Dewlish House, doubly in hiding: behind the trees, and covered in scaffolding and plastic sheeting. (You can have a sneak peak here).

But the footpath goes no nearer the house, just cuts across one corner of park, fording the Devil's Brook, before veering off into the woods.


I think that impressive brick building was once the stable block.









The bluebells not quite all gone over.

Comments

[nikonf3]

Nice shots. I love walking through old graveyards but everything out here is fairly recent, 19th century earliest.

[puddleshark]

Thanks!

Same here. In the quarrying villages, down near the coast, some wonderful early headstones have survived - real works of the mason's art. Further inland, a lot of churchyards here were cleared of old monuments when the churches were restored in the 19th century, and it's rarer to come across headstones that pre-date the 19th century.

[nikonf3]

At the beginning of the 20th century, they evicted the dead from San Francisco. The land was sorely needed by the living. But they left the tiny graveyard at Mission Dolores. And of course the military graves in the Presidio remain. Do you know why they cleared the headstones in your churchyards?

[puddleshark]

In some of the bigger churchyards, I think it was done from an excess of tidiness - when a church was restored, they would clear away all the old headstones at the same time. Sometimes just smashed them up, and used the stone to lay roads.

Mostly though I think the graves here were cleared not for the living, but for the dead. Most villages have small churchyards. In the 18th century this wasn't a problem, as only the wealthy could afford memorials. But by the middle of the 19th century, everyone gets a headstone (except the paupers in the workhouse) - a headstone was a sign of respectability. The old headstones were cleared to make way for the new.

[nikonf3]

I like the simple palette of the first picture, grey, green and red and how the flowers are in sharp focus while the background is softer.

[puddleshark]

Thanks!

I wish the light had been better. Those marble angels would have made fabulous subjects if the play of light had been right.