The Hunger for Place

The significance of place is often not articulated as having anything to do with religion. Shrines spring up spontaneously when people are killed in road crashes, or at the sites of murders, as if the place had either been hallowed by the death, or possibly desecrated by it and was in need of re-hallowing. Those who deal professionally with the aftermath of incidents where there have been mass casualties often stress the problems of referring to the tragedy by the name of the place it happened. They comment that those who live in places like in Lockerbie or Aberfan, for example, often long to be able to go back to the time when no one had heard of their town or village, and that the association of it solely with tragedy makes it impossible for communities to move on from their grief.

As any incumbent who has care of a churchyard will know, families, even avowedly atheist ones,  often treat the graves of their loved ones as sacred space, and all hell can break loose if the grass isn’t mown, or is mown in the wrong way, or if their desire to mark their space happens to contravene the Churchyard Regulations (1981). The six by four foot space allocated to their loved one is holy ground, and so is the twelve by eighteen inch space allocated to the interment of cremated remains. In fact, the smaller the space the more intense the feelings about it can be. Clergy with churchyards to administer all have stories to tell about feelings running high when things go wrong with the marking of the space, of squabbles between the families of those buried in neighbouring plots, of strange offerings left on graves – the miniatures of whisky, the Christmas decorations, the birthday cards and notes. The families concerned would no doubt, if asked, say that they knew their loved ones couldn’t read the notes and cards, and couldn’t drink the whisky, but they still leave them, whatever their professed or unprofessed religious beliefs. Those who want the physical remains of their loved ones laid to rest in a churchyard or cemetery are clearly saying that place matters to them, even if the idea of the dead climbing out of their graves on the Last Day means nothing to them. It might be thought that those who prefer to scatter their loved ones’ ashes on a hillside or into the sea are rejecting this, but in fact the places chosen for that scattering are usually immensely significant, a place that was particularly loved or associated with special memories, for example. While some people may say “just put me out with the rubbish when I go”, when the moment comes, families rarely feel they want to do so.

Mozart in London by Philip Le Bas

Secular “holy places” can be places to celebrate as well as to mourn. The blue plaques which mark the home of famous historical characters are a source of pride to local communities, for example, as if the aura of that person still shone from its rooms. The artist, Philip Le Bas (my husband’s late uncle) painted a series of pictures of “blue plaque” homes with their subjects pictured inside them , capturing very well this sense that the previous occupants were in some sense still present in the bricks and mortar, however much had changed since then.

Another example of the importance to communities of marking and “owning” their famous inhabitants was seen in the aftermath of the 2012 Olympic Games, when every gold medal winner had a post box painted gold in their honour in the place they had grown up or lived in. This apparently simple way of honouring an illustrious member of the community had its pitfalls, however, as Royal Mail soon discovered. Where should the post box be if the person had moved in childhood? Who had best claim to the sporting hero in question? Who got to decide? Trouble broke out in some such cases. The Royal Mail painted a box in Restronguet Passage, Cornwall where sailor Ben Ainslie had grown up and learned to sail, but feelings ran so high in Lymington, where he was a resident, that a member of the public vandalised the paintbox there. Royal Mail were going to file a complaint, but relented when they saw how strong local feeling was, and not only relented, but painted the Lymington post box gold as well. There was no softening though, when the Winter Olympics of 2014 were held and communities expected gold post boxes for winners there too. These games although in some sense part of the same “cycle” as 2012 had taken place in Sochi, not in the UK, and so community pleas for gold boxes for their gold medal winners, like Lizzy Yarnold, fell on deaf ears. Place was everything! The afterlife of the gold post boxes has been just as complicated. Initially they were planned to be temporary, but Royal Mail were so deluged with complaints about this that they promised they would remain gold in perpetuity. Some of the boxes have suffered vandalism, however. Andy Murray’s box soon had paint chipped off it by souvenir hunters, an echo of the ancient fate of relics like the True Cross, which was eventually cut up into splinters and distributed around the world, because pilgrims had the deplorable tendency to bit chunks out of it when it was presented to them to kiss.

Witheridge

Many people enjoy tracing their family history, and that often prompts a desire to visit the place where their ancestors lived. In my own case, that has meant trips to obscure villages in Devon, Yorkshire, Faversham and a metaphorical hat tip every time I go through Borough Green and Wrotham Station, where a great-great-grandfather was Station Master, probably the first, during the 1870s and 1880s until, according to a family rumour, a scandal involving herrings (!) caused him to lose his job.   I have traced my family history back in one branch to the 1670s, and a small village between Dartmoor and Exmoor called Witheridge, and though there is absolutely no trace of any family who lived there, it felt important for me to make the “pilgrimage” to see it, taking my daughter with me, to see the church where my oldest traceable ancestors were married. There may be nothing to see, but people seem to feel the need to know where their roots are. The genealogical programme, Who do you think you are?”  could just as well be named Where do you think you come from? because at its heart are always the journeys that the participants make to the places their ancestors came from.

Walking in the footsteps of our ancestors...