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poliphiloA guy came to service my mother's stairlift yesterday and was telling us how he liked to photograph birds and how hard it was because they're always in motion and I said I like to photograph churches because they stay still- and from there we moved- as one does- onto the subject of churchyards....
He said he was walking through a huge cemetery in Chatham a while back and the guy he was with pointed out a fenced off area and said, "That's where they buried the witches", so our man went and had a closer look and sure enough, the inscription on one of the stones said, "Here lies So and So, Presumably a Witch".
Now this touches on a number of my specialist subjects- social history, funerary monuments, witchcraft- and I know it's absolutely inconceivable that anyone- in any era- would have inscribed "Presumably a Witch" on a gravestone, but I don't think the engineer was lying- because (a) why would he? and (b) it didn't feel like he was faking the extent to which his mind had been boggled. I didn't tell him he must have been mistaken because that would have been rude- but I've been left wondering what on earth it was he'd seen that he'd mis-read or misunderstood...
He said he was walking through a huge cemetery in Chatham a while back and the guy he was with pointed out a fenced off area and said, "That's where they buried the witches", so our man went and had a closer look and sure enough, the inscription on one of the stones said, "Here lies So and So, Presumably a Witch".
Now this touches on a number of my specialist subjects- social history, funerary monuments, witchcraft- and I know it's absolutely inconceivable that anyone- in any era- would have inscribed "Presumably a Witch" on a gravestone, but I don't think the engineer was lying- because (a) why would he? and (b) it didn't feel like he was faking the extent to which his mind had been boggled. I didn't tell him he must have been mistaken because that would have been rude- but I've been left wondering what on earth it was he'd seen that he'd mis-read or misunderstood...
