Gargoyles and Graveyards

There's no denying I find graveyards fascinating.  A mournful admission, I know, but old graveyards, with their mossy gravestones, scents of grass and usually shaded by yew trees, are such pleasantly calm spaces perfect for uninterrupted reflection, and their fading carvings with names and dates and epitaphs give little insights to lives long gone.  Take the typical: Joe Bloggs, 1916 to 1944, beloved of his wife Edith Bloggs who joined him in eternal rest on 15th April 1968.  Could not countless stories be spun here?  Joe was a victim of the D-day landings, and poor Edith mourned him for over twenty years.  Or did Edith fall prey to the oversexed, overpaid and over there US GI's?  Did she ever remarry?  Did he leave children, grandchildren?  Did he die in the war, or had he been invalided home only to die ignominiously of a relatively trivial illness?  I can't stop the questions. Each would write a perfect story.  But then, that's the occupational hazard of being a writer - you inevitably have to reign in your imagination, come back down to earth, pack up your lunchtime leftovers and head back to the office, leaving those graves to their longed-for peace.

My favourite graveyards are the tumbling ones that lie in the shade of an old stone churchy, such as that of St Michael's in Sittingbourne, or Our Lady of Gillingham, on Gillingham Green in Kent.  As a kid I would spend hours with friends wondering in and out of the gravestones reading the graves.  They are both old graveyards, and some stones had been clearly deserted for decades, their carvings weathered so that they were indecipherable, the stones pock-marked with yellow lichens and furred at the damper edges with green mosses.  

One particularly gruesome grave had burst its stone trims and sprouted a full yew tree from its very centre.  We avoided that one.  The tree, to our adolescent minds, had eaten away the corpse and had sucked in the essences of the dead man that lay under there.  When the wind howled or the tree swayed in a storm, we imagined it to be the spirit of the dead man screaming to be set free.  Autumn was a perfect time at Gillingham Green to walk in the yellow leaves of the row of horse chestnuts that lined the edge of the park and gather conkers.  It was a time when it grew dark shortly after we had left school and the winter mists gathered around the tree trunks and the gravestones seemed to grow darker and larger.

Some graveyards lie in the shadow of grand cathedrals, great gothic structures reaching out to the heavens for the greater glory of God.  And along their every edge, roofs and pillars, perch the ghastly gargoyles.  I know from lectures on art history and architecture that these gargoyles were fashioned to create something a little meaningful out of a guttering system, a way of making sure that rain water was led away from the building to avoid water ingress.  Quite an ingenious way of keeping a building dry and I rather wish that modern builders in my part of the world where it may not rain often, but when it does it rains everywhere, outdoors and in, had taken good note of this.

Photo "Gargoyle at Notre Dame" by Vichaya Kiatying-Angsuli, courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhoto.net

But gargoyles are something else that spark the imagination, along with gravestones, marble monuments, epitaphs and crows resting on stone walls.  They are fearsome, gruesome, creatures that appear to have risen from the pits of hell, so unlikely perching on the roof of a church.  They may be there to terrify evil spirits and keep the congregation safe from the devil and his troops, but somehow they seem to be the inverse of that.  To me, they are the lurking presence of evil hovering on the shoulders of those gathered to worship, ready to pick off the weak in spirit, those souls who are not true to themselves, who attend services as a sham to cover up their more evil doings.  The gargoyles are the all-seeing reminder that evil is all around, that the Dark Closes In..........