Wednesday 17 August 2017
Summer’s always a busy time what with people being away on
holiday etc. But we have been able to meet up most Wednesdays to type up a few
more grave reference sheets and sort out anomalies that arise when we compare
our data to the parish church records. Admittedly for many people this may seem
to be the dullest stage of the process, but for those of us who have tackled
the data entry, it has definitely proved to be so interesting. We find that as
we type up the data we can start to see trends and patterns, we can ask all
sorts of questions about the information we are gathering, and the whole
project starts to makes sense. We can now see all sorts of possibilities with
what we can do with this data.
Our fascination with gravestones has only
intensified as we realise what huge scope there is in investigating the social
and cultural significance of design, iconography, the wording of epitaphs, the meaning
of spatial distribution, and the production processes involved in creating the
headstones. That and, of course, all the local and family history too! And we
haven’t even begun to study the lichens and mosses growing on the stones yet.
Today was, at last, the first day when we could really take
advantage of some summer weather – so we spent the morning taking a few photos
that we missed before, and filling in a few other missing details on our survey
forms. During the project we have learnt much, and we now realise that we were
missing significant details in the early days of our survey.
In the afternoon, Sue and I – over some nice chocolate cake
of course - had a long and very useful discussion about how we can share our
experiences and knowledge with other groups, and how we can move forward with
the data analysis. We have several options which we need to investigate – and this
is perhaps the most exciting part of the whole project – sharing what we have
done, and also taking it further into a broader context ; what we need now is a
busman’s holiday, visiting other burial sites to compare our village churchyard
to other places.
Jane Lunnon
