REFLECTIONS IN A WELSH GRAVEYARD

If you park your car in a little car park next to a Chinese restaurant close to the Waitrose at the Menai Bridge on Anglesey, you will find a footpath already used by many dog walkers that will take you down to the waterside and eventually close enough to the famous Menai Bridge itself to let you truly appreciate its magnificence.

It’s quite a lovely little stroll, even on a damp morning, offering as it does a very good opportunity to view the various seabirds as they go about the business of surviving on whatever delights the rocks and the mud happen to bring to them. You will also be rewarded by stunning views of the Menai Stait itself as the water thunders its way through it with its strong currents that have caused so many boats and ships to come to grief over the centuries, as well as some of the finest views of the two engineering marvels, Thomas Telford’s Menai Bridge and the later Britannia Bridge.

The path itself is part of the Anglesey Coastal Path, but if you just followed that path along its route which takes you along the Belgian Promenade, originally built in gratitude to local hospitality by Belgian refugees during the first world war, you would miss out on one of the most beautiful and relaxing spots that I have ever discovered.

So, instead of just heading off towards the obvious excitements offered by the opportunity to see one of the engineering miracles of the nineteenth century, if you do ever find yourself in the area, you really might want to treat yourself and take a few moments to cross the Causeway to “Church Island” (“Ynys Dysilio” or “Ynys Tysilio” - either works, apparently...) where the 15th Century church of St Tysilio stands in its churchyard which takes up the bulk of the 2.7 acres of the island. Not only will this rather beautiful place give you the very best views of the bird life and both of the bridges crossing the Stait, but it is one of the most peaceful, possibly even tranquil, spots I’ve ever yet found.

Even when I was much younger, I always used to find graveyards rather comforting places to hang around in, once I got over the incredibly stupid superstition that someone once planted in my young mind that if you trod upon someone’s grave, you would die at the same age as they were. They are always strange those odd ideas that certain people get into their heads and like to share with others, but that notion does still cause me to shudder every so often when I remember it, even if the logic escaped the younger me. After all, all you needed to do was find the grave of someone considerably older and you would be fine, wouldn’t you?

Buried here amongst the locals are the remains of some of the workers killed during the construction of those fine bridges as well as some of the victims of several of the many shipwrecks that have occurred in the Strait itself and beyond on those treacherous shores, and which make me incredibly pleased about and impressed by the continuing work of the R.N.L.I., one of the many, many things that make demands upon our generosity nowadays, but one to which I always feel the need to give gratefully to because I’m simply so amazed and awestruck by the work that they do when they have to do it. It’s much like the other emergency services in that respect, in that they are the people who run towards the danger when everyone else is following their instinctive need to run away.

It makes you think, doesn’t it? That someone is prepared to run towards the danger at great risk to themselves to save the lives of people they have never met and possibly lose their own life whilst doing so.

Perhaps that’s why I like churchyards so much. They are places where you can’t help but simply think and reflect upon things like such bravery and other, more spiritual matters. As you stroll about, reading all the inscriptions carved into the various headstones, you can’t help but ponder about all those lives lived and reduced to a few names and dates carved into a slab of weathered rock. I always find myself wondering what these people were really like when they were alive, and what it was like to actually know these long lost people, what it was that made them laugh and cry, whether they were good people or bad people, and whether they were the kind of people I would have enjoyed being in the company of, or maybe just the total opposite.

Sometimes the sheer youthfulness implied by the dates are truly humbling. What were the tragic circumstances that led to such shortened lives, or for so many brothers and sisters, husbands and wives from the same family to be so struck by grief and misfortune? I’m sure many of the sad stories hidden behind those few simple words came from poverty or a simple lack of knowledge of medical practices we nowadays seem to take for granted, but it’s too easy to just dismiss these real lives lived in such an offhand way.

Every name you read has a lost story that was probably well known at the time it happened and can almost certainly never be told in all it’s fullest detail now, but which nevertheless vexed and tormented those who knew them at the time, only to drift away into those mists of time and the sea of forgotten memories. How can you do more than guess at the circumstances of the story of a whole lifetime reduced to simply a name and a couple of years carved into stone? Each time I walk around such places I leave them full of reflections upon my own mortality, a need to make the most of my days, and the bleaching effect of history, knowing that so very few of us will do enough with our allotted span to make an impression that will mean much more to anyone than a few fading memories and maybe a word or two to let history know that we were here, that we lived and died, worried and fretted, laughed and enjoyed just as much as anyone else did.

As the rather chilling epitaph I read on a stone once said, “As I am now, so you will one day be…”

I’ll bet he was fun to be around. Maybe he was, but it’s hard to know for sure.