One of the pleasures of cycling around the countryside is stopping to look at old rural churches. A number of them are quite isolated from the villages they serve, and are incredibly peaceful. This is an example from Studham.
I like to quietly wander around, looking at the gravestones, picking out the common names, getting a glimpse of a past time, noting the age at which people died. On one family stone in this graveyard I saw that a man had died less than a year after his son was killed in the Great War - in my imagination he died of grief.
The First World War and the remoteness of this church made me think of "A Month in the Country' by J.L. Carr (and if you haven't read it, I would recommend it).
It is the story of someone back from the war, but mentally scarred, who is hired to uncover a mural in a village church. Gradually, through interaction with the lives of those he meets he begins to heal. It is a short book, where nothing much happens but it is lovely.
One of the pleasures of cycling around the countryside is that you can put yourself in other's stories.
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