Soil

As undertakers for nearly eighteen years, and sextons for four, (someone who manages a burial ground) we are familiar with soil. It stains our lowering straps and our hands.

The red clay of Torquay, the deep rich loam of the far West of Cornwall, the shilletty, unyielding earth of our own ground at Sharpham Meadow, the earth our bodies return to is as varied as we are.

We bury shallow, to allow the our bodies to return to their allotted elements as quickly as possible. The bones remain of course, almost immortal, stone-like themselves.

I remember an ancient churchyard in Lincolnshire, so old the porch had a Sheila-na-gig above the door, where every shovel from the gravediggers heft threw up a pile of bones.

Ancient skulls, ribs and knucklebones mingled with the flints. I felt like Lyra Belacqua in the underworld, or Hamlet meeting Yorick again. Eerie yet oddly comforting. We are the stone beneath the grass, the blood beneath the turf.

The land of Britain is filled with these stone bodies, marked and unmarked, peacefully lain down or hidden in darkness by dark people. We stand on our forefathers and our matriarchs.

At Sharpham Meadow, in the middle of the field, we have a fire, the Ancestor’s Fire pit, and it is lit now with almost every funeral.

Scattered in its scorched ashes lie the bone fragments of five people.

The soil has become more than chemically changed, its been ritually transformed, alchemically even. Every fire that’s lit with the charred logs from the previous one reignites these sandy fragments, these frames that held and supported our fleshy puppets. It makes them glow unseen, it takes the ash and sacralises it. To wear it as a smudge on the forehead like a Sadhu at the Varanasi Ghats would be to complete a circle that links the Ganges to the Dart, rivers and death, winding to the sea together, taking us all down into the rising sun.

It’s possible for archaeologists to see where, thousands of years before, a lone hunter stopped, just once, to light a warming fire, to cook a rabbit and wrap themselves around the dying embers for comfort as they slept before moving on. The soil is changed and marked for ever, no matter how many times it is ploughed and civilised by agriculture.

I wonder what they will make of our bone fire. Is it soil or is it soul? Will spirit and intention rise from the spot like a heat shimmer long after we have become stone ourselves?