Although many people see cemeteries as scary places full of dead people – it’s a cemetery, so yes it is full of dead people – it can also contain social history, interesting names for storytellers, wildlife including butterflies and symbols. The stories behind the people buried there and why they’re there, sometimes many miles from home. And that’s what has always fascinated me about cemeteries. It was the story behind the angel that intrigued me. But I’m not as fit as I was then and I had no idea where to even try to look. Little did I know that, 15 years later, whilst exploring the derelict and very large asylum on the opposite slope of the valley, Cane Hill, that I would return to the Downs to try and find the angel again. Were these people or animals that had been buried there? But it was only when I, very recently took the photo out again, that I noticed that there was lettering on the stone beneath the angel. I took my picture and as neither of us cared for the atmosphere of the place we moved on. But in its centre was a headless statue of a child on top of a large stone. There were names and ages on some of them but nothing else. It was a large area with cut grass and large stones all round its edges. Then, as we passed what appeared to be a farm complex we passed a clearing near the top of the downs. I was a lot fitter in those days and it didn’t worry me that the downs were 500ft up at that highest point. We wandered about exploring with me taking photos of anything interesting or unusual. Its figures of angels and devils at the back of the congregation must have been a little worrying.īut I knew none of this at the time. It’s in the middle of nowhere with no surrounding village but contains the oldest ‘doom’ painting in England. The nearby Chaldon church would soon become one of my favourite places whenever I subsequently visited on urban exploring foraging. In the spring, drifts of bluebells cover the downs like small patches of sky, and the brightness of Happy Valley really hits you when you emerge from Devilsden Woods. It is a local beauty spot with, at the time, one Victorian asylum on the other side of the valley and a group of Saxon burials and tumuli on its slopes. A flatmate had taken me on a Sunday afternoon drive to a place I now know to be Farthing Downs near Coulsdon in Surrey. It was on a Sunday afternoon in 1990 that I encountered my first cemetery mystery.
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