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I am not going to write about Hitchin Cemetery every day of 2026, but I could do. And as my own life draws (hopefully very slowly) towards its inevitable end and becomes more boring, it's interesting to write about the entirely finished lives of others. It feels like every grave is the start of a potential adventure (if you can call failing to find a Victorian villa because it's been turned into modern flats an adventure) and certainly contains a myriad of stories.
Plus every now and again you remember that you are walking above the skellingtons and corpses of hundreds of people, most of whom probably walked through this very cemetery themselves, never quite believing that one day they would join the potential zombies beneath. It's history, philosophy, mystery and mysticism all in one short walk.
It feels like there might be a book or a podcast or a graveyard based gameshow (like a Treasure Hunt for the dead - maybe a job for Anneka Rice after she dies) or something in this, but maybe just the occasional blog will do the job,
The graves that grabbed my attention today didn't take me off my usual route home, but they did both raise some questions or at leat one question. What the fuck was going on here.
The first one is not really about the people buried there but the grave itself. For some reason I can't attach this photo here! Spooky.
Though you can see it on the substack)There are plenty of damaged and almost destroyed graves in the graveyard of course, but mostly they are fairly old ones. This one is 60 years old, though includes someone who died just 40 years ago. It is cleft in twain in quite a Biblical manner, as if lightening has struck from above or some dark force has come from below. Most likely, I suppose, is it got hit by a falling tree. It's quite a solid bit of stone to get smashed like this, so cleanly. One hopes it isn't vandalism or some kind of revenge from the living against the dead. You would hope with such a modern grave that someone would be around to repair the damage, but maybe there is no one left around.
There is no sign of where the blow that destroyed this headstone. It just lies smashed like a 10 Commandment stone, thrown down by a furious Moses.
It acts as quite a simplistic jigsaw puzzle to recreate the epitaphs (and even with just a 2 part jigsaw, at least from this photo, you can't completely manage it)
But it's the grave of Ernest (J)ames Bray who died in (Ma)rch 1966 aged (?0) years and his wife Rosa Bray who dies in Ap(ri)l 1986 aged (?)6 years. I reckon maybe 96 but as you can see I am not allowing any assumptions. Maybe he was Ernest (W)ames Bray and he died in (Marble A)rch
The pair are "Together Again" which is slightly ironic now given that the words Together and again are no longer together. If you wanted to get supernatural on this you might wonder if some secret was revealed in death that infuriated one half of the couple to smash their stone in anger. Though surely you'd have gone for a horizontal fracture rather than a vertical one. But I don't know how much power corpses have to make stone break in the direction you would like.
I don't know what provision the Cemetery has to mend broken graves, but it feels like a shame that noone has got the Prit Stick out for this one. There may be reasons.
I love the graves which employ pictures or extra features to give a hint of the lives of those who are now gone. Or at least to put a face to a name (and a skull). I am slightly intrigued and bamboozled by the headstone for Joe and Bridget Smith, which rather than showing a photo of either or both of them, has a picture of a red car instead. The significance of the car will be known to some, but in a few decades will be lost to the ages. Perhaps Joe and Bridget worked in the motor trade or perhaps one of them just really liked the car. More than their spouse or themself. It doesn't really matter. It's fun to imagine the husband prizing his car above all else and insisting on that being on the joint grave. But Joe went first and Bridget will likely have chosen the picture or certainly had 14 years to veto it if she didn't want it on her grave too. The heart shape and the fresh flowers and the stone not being split in two by Zeus certainly attests to the fact that these two loved each other and are still loved. Why the car though?
It would be interesting to know what this was about, but it's more intriguing not to know. My hope is that some future archaeologist will dig up that grave and discover the couple in an embrace, sitting in the front seats of the car they were buried in.
