There has been a place of worship on this spot since 1180 but no one seems to know why St James’ church was founded on this hillside half a mile from the village. “Man fleeth as it were a passing shadow,” cautions the sundial above the porch. Perhaps the grandeur of the rising sun, as I watched it lifting deep shadows from the valley cut by the river Wear, moved its founders to build here.
I wandered around the churchyard, reading names on tombstones carved by stonemasons whose own identities have long since been forgotten.
In the earliest, dating from the mid-18th century, I could almost hear accents in words chiselled freehand, in elegant script. “Buri’d William Rutter May 20th. 1767 Aged 48,” read one, with unsentimental matter-of-factness and an inexplicable use of an apostrophe.
Perhaps the carver of Ralph Hodgson’s simple headstone in 1758 was distracted as he cut his higgledy-piggledy letters. He forgot to capitalise the deceased’s surname and ran out of space on the sandstone slab, so the final two letters, “on”, sit above “hodgs”, teetering on the edge of oblivion, as an afterthought.
As I walked outwards from the church, the years passed, the graveyard filled and headstones became more formal, pious and decorative, until I reached the full glory of the memorial to William Simpson (died 1876).
The finely hewn dove on the headstone exemplified the sentimental symbolism enshrined in nature that is such a feature of the Victorian attitude to mourning. Below, gothic script, machine-carved and thus perfectly aligned and spaced, reflected the precision and wealth that came with the industrial revolution and swept aside the jobbing rural stonemason with his chisel and idiosyncratic spelling.
Cemeteries are full of mysteries, of stories hinted at that can only be guessed. In this little Christian churchyard there is one headstone that defies explanation. Why does the memorial raised by Christopher Parkin to his granddaughter Alice Parkin, who died aged 12 in 1815, bear the Muslim inscription “Allah Kerim, The Providence of God is Great”? And why is there no mention of her parents? There must be a story buried with her.
Follow Country diary on Twitter: @GdnCountryDiary
