The gothic spires of the old church rose above the town of Heptonstall. At first we lost ourselves trying to find our way through the narrow winding streets, but with a glance up at the bell tower, we knew our way at once. Beyond the wrought iron gates of the church’s burying ground, an army of grave stones stood crooked, overgrown with lichen and moss. Even her old church seems to be dying; it is only a bell tower scraping the skies.
The old church of St. Thomas the Apostle is only ruins now. Hollow faces, chiseled from stone, glare down from the church’s heights as we pass. One of them, I see, has lost his nose. Even the streets of Heptonstall were as silent as a gothic ghost town; whether the cold weather has driven people indoors, or the town has returned to a state emptied of tourism, I don’t know. The stones of her buildings are still blackened, as if grown dark from the soot that arrived two hundred years ago and never left.
There’s the wind again—not a gentle breeze like in the valleys of Cumbria, but an eerie thing that howls through the church spires, rakes through the tops of the trees, and stirs the piles of dead leaves from their sleep. It strains, like a melancholy note of violin music, through my friend’s crutch.
It’s not just the October weather, though. There is something in the air of this place. What is it? Before I can even voice the question aloud, another student appears from around the corner of the church. He points further down the path, like a foreboding ghost, and tells us that “Her grave is across the street.”
Across the street we go. Yet when we arrive, there is no one left in the burying ground but the dead. We draw to a stop at the gates and stare at the hundreds of graves lining the field. This burying ground was newer, but it was overgrown with unkempt weeds, and we had no idea where to look first.
When we finally found Sylvia Plath’s grave, it was not marked with special ceremony or a marble slab. The headstone was simply inscribed with her name, the years she lived, and a line of poetry: “Even amidst fierce flames / the golden lotus can be planted.” There is nothing to suggest that she was anyone more memorable than the hundreds of others buried in that field. In fact, her grave looked rather like a garden patch.
Perhaps it wasn’t the grave that mattered, but the memory of the person. Memories are kept through stories, through the retelling of moments that matter. In that case, Sylvia’s memory lives through her writing. Yet however important it may be, her memory—and the memory of all those buried here—didn’t seem to be being sustained.
A glance at the rest of the graveyard showed that it was rarely tended. Even the most carefully carved of headstones, the ones inscribed with beautiful epitaphs, were overgrown with weeds taller than my head. Was it a mark of abandonment, I wondered, or was this place intentionally left to the shaping of time and wind?
When we traveled to the Moors, we questioned whether literature influences the way we interpret a place, or whether the bleakness of a landscape will shape the stories told about it. When we think about the stories told about Yorkshire—when we think of Hughes and Plath and the Bronte sisters—we imagine the haunting wildness of their stories.
Now that I’m here, I don’t need to imagine anymore. I can sense it. I remember the bus ride across those cloud-shadowed hilltops, looking down at the distant deep valleys, feeling the wind sweep over the distance and blow against us too. There are no lakes or fells to soften the horizon here; there is only endlessness.
Perhaps the people of Heptonstall know better than to prevent the natural turning of time. Perhaps it is a part of their remembering. This graveyard, like the rest of the Yorkshire moors, has been left to the wind. It has always been left to the wind.
<3 Olivia Grace
