The Long Grass
Last week, on a near-perfect summer's evening, I visited St Margaret's churchyard to photograph and film the first scenes of the village itself — footage that will sit alongside the portraits and interviews as LightKeep takes shape.
The churchyard felt like the right place to start. It's where the village's stories are preserved in stone: names, dates, people I don't know yet — some of them the same names I've been finding in the archive boxes at The Grange.
Like a great many English churchyards, it's casually, spectacularly beautiful. Walking through the wild grasses and crooked headstones, past valerian spilling from the flint walls, midges revolving in solemn order in the evening light, I could feel those stories all around me. Headstones are a remarkable glimpse into other people's lives — lives now concluded, stories complete. But a glimpse is all they are. Some are so sparse and genteel it's hard to sense the rich lives behind them. Others are so elegant, so evocative, that it's impossible not to be intrigued, invested — dragged in.
I shared the film with Mike, who passed it on, and word came back from Dawn, one of the temporary churchwardens ('…while we look for our new vicar'). The wild grasses and frothing cow parsley I'd been filming — the very things that made the evening light worth capturing — aren't neglect at all. The churchyard is being returned to nature, and Dawn spends a fair amount of her time explaining as much to people who write in to say it looks unkempt. She asked whether the church might use the film on its website, to help make in pictures the case she's been making in words. Of course. What reads as untidy is, up close, real care — real consideration for the place and its history.
Later, as I was about to leave, I met Heather, locking the church for the night. I introduced myself and mentioned that Mike knew about my filming, and she was warm about it at once — though I learned that others have filmed here without asking, and that this hadn't gone down well. Funny and devoted in the same breath, she's another of the village's custodians, of whom I'm discovering there are many: people who look after a place the way you might look after a child — without question, without needing a reason.
It's an early theme. With every conversation another shadowed corner is illuminated — Mike to Dawn, Dawn to the churchyard, the churchyard to Heather. I'm starting to see the next layer down: the people and the stories, all thrumming away, straining upwards, towards the warm light.
