“Church” says the road sign, plain and simple. Which means Hope Bagot, the village I have been hunting for, has crept up on me unannounced. That’s the way of things in the Shropshire Hills, where all is enfolded, mysterious, ancient. The settlements don’t cluster openly around anything as obvious as a village green. The houses hide behind tall hedges down sunken lanes. This land guards its secrets; and what secrets there are at Hope Bagot. And yet, take the bend in the lane at anything more than walking pace and you would miss what is by several measures a sacred site. Another of the glories is the churchyard, a drift of grassland that has remained undisturbed, apart from burials, for the best part of 2,000 years. While the demands of modern agriculture have sanitised the pretty, rolling countryside all around, the churchyard has been protected through all time from both the fertilisers and manures that enrich the naturally poor soil, and the chemicals that kill the hundreds of species of wild flower and grasses that to agribusiness are weeds. Which means that, here in the sanctuary of the churchyard, the hundreds of native species that have disappeared from most of I’ve come to Hope Bagot to meet Sue Cooper, who knows as much as anyone of the art of protecting churchyards. “The season is two weeks late,” she says, as we walk along one of the mown pathways through a sea of flowers. “The oxeye daisies have yet to come out, but we do have cow parsley and buttercups.” These are the most obvious blooms, but encouraged to look more closely I see what I had taken for grass is actually a myriad different plants that make up the rich mat of vegetation. There are around 200 species here. “See the little white flower?” asks Sue, pointing to a plant that has deep green fronds like the carrot, to which it is related. “That’s Pignut. It has a little nut in its root that pigs love to root out. “Later, this churchyard will have Meadow Sweet, Birds-foot trefoil, “In autumn, there will be Devil’s-bit Scabious, which has only returned since we have been looking after things. It’s called that because the purple flower heads break off leaving a sharply-cut stem that looks as if it has been bitten off. The seeds had probably been lying dormant here for years.” And then there are the grasses. “This is Sweet Vernal-grass,” says Sue, cupping a seed head between her fingers. “When it is cut it releases a chemical that gives of that wonderful new-mown-hay smell. This is Cock’s Foot – you see the seed head looks like a chicken’s foot.” Six years ago Sue created a charity called Caring for God’s Acre. The aim was to encourage local parishes to nurture their churchyards. The response was overwhelming, and now over 100 churches in the But that is not simply a question, as I had naively believed, of just leaving the churchyards unmown. As Sue explains, preserving ancient unimproved grasslands like this doesn’t mean leaving them untended, and the displays of wild flowers that will fill the summer with colour do not come without help. “Grassland management is an exact science,” she says. “It can take two or three years of regular cutting, during which you sacrifice flowers, to beat back the course grasses and the aggressive plants you don’t want.” She points to some fleshy, hairy Hogweed that has colonised a grave. “If there was too much of that, you’d dig it out.” A strict mowing regime is followed at Hope Bagot. “We make the first cut in February before the first flowering, then we wait until the spring flowers have died down and the summer flowers have set seed before we cut again, regularly, to the end of the season. The cut grass must be raked off because the flowers want poor soil not enriched by compost.” In each parish, a team of churchyard gardeners has been formed. “I’m - horrible word - an enabler,” Sue says. At Hope Bagot, the Stourbridge Ramblers come regularly to bolster the efforts of villagers. They shift the mown hay and are rewarded with a picnic in the churchyard. To help in their work, the bands of volunteers that care for these 100-plus churchyards can call upon a machine called the God’s Acre Trimmer, which was developed - with help and cash from English Nature - to cut grass to the required length, and around gravestones without damaging them. Around £500,000 has been obtained in grants from the national Heritage Lottery Fund and Defra. Now Sue hopes that Caring for God’s Acre will go national. Shortly after we met, a two-day national conference in It was seeing how much the countryside had lost since her childhood that drew Sue to found God’s Acre. “When I was a farmer’s daughter South Staffs in 50s, I had a book in which I drew the wildflowers I saw. There must have been over 60 wildflowers on the farm, but now I doubt you’d find half a dozen.” I ask how she settled upon the name, Caring for God’s Acre. “Henry Wordsworth Longfellow wrote a poem in 1841 called God’s Acre, and it has the lines: ‘I like that ancient Saxon phrase/ which calls The burial ground God’s I tell her it makes me think of the Stanley Spencer’s The Resurrection, Cookham, which portrays a Sue takes me to another of her churchyards, just down the lane at St Mary the Virgin in Whitton, where Orange Tip butterflies flit between the mauve flowers on carpets of Bugle. One of the church’s treasures is a stunning stained glass window that was designed by Burne-Jones and executed by William Morris. It’s an unexpected find in a simple country church. The backdrop is of vibrant foliage and deep red flowers. Equally lovely is the tradition, revealed in the churchyard, of carving flowers and other plants on gravestones. On one cruciform stone there are ears of corm, fleur de lisle and daisies, surrounding clasped hands. On another there is a bold bas-relief lily, on another a clutch of ferns. And I’m struck at how closely interwoven, in this English country churchyard, are the twin themes of faith and of flowers.
|  St John the Baptist at Hope Bagot |
