Unlike a tree, I don’t have rings, and they don’t grow. I flourish, then I die back, then I flourish. The circle is not unbroken – at least not unless somebody builds a high-speed rail link through my core. But my contours do change. I have one more buttock than I once had. Over on my left knee, where St John’s churchyard can be found, I’m lumpier than I once was. People look at the couple of hundred gravestones and they think that’s it, that’s history. They don’t consider the others beneath the earth, all the centuries before that, all the bones piling up, changing the shape of the land. All the forgotten lives that felt like something more than this, something that mattered, when they were being lived. There was a period of about forty years, going from the last century, stretching into the very early part of this one, when the cemetery was kept very neat, over-mowed and over-strimmed. The shrieking of the beetles and butterflies as they died was a kind of tinnitus for me. Now mercifully the volunteers responsible for its upkeep lean towards a wilder aesthetic. The fact presents itself in stark beauty: wildflowers love dead people. On an early spring day like today, primroses, celandine and forget-me-nots are rife. It’s a cheery technicolour place with a light mood but on an ink-washed afternoon in the darkest, wettest heights of winter walkers feel a shiver as they explore its corners. If the beheaded statue of John Maypoll, a six-year-old child who died of polio in 1913, or the three mysteriously nameless graves inscribed with nothing but ‘Cholera, 1847’ don’t do it then the carvings inside the building itself generally will. The oldest and crudest of these dates from the 1100s. Most frequently discussed is the Sheela-na-gig on the north wall, and what is variously referred to as ‘The Bird Lady’ and ‘The Girls’ on the font. These are described thus in the second issue of Jack In The Green, the pagan-inclined Devonshire history pamphlet, by the pamphlet’s editor Simon Bridestow in May 1993: