Silent Sunday Cemetery Scapes ~ St. Tudno's, Great Orme

Five Cherubs

And

With the 

Morn

Those

Angel Faces

Sleep

In 

Loving Memory

Edward Thomas Harris

The Beloved Husband of Elizabeth Harris

St. Tudno's  Gt. Orme

Born ~ unreadable

Died July 2?th 1915 

When I saw Laurie's recent post at Graveyard Detective I recognised it and straight away I knew that I had a  photograph very similar to his one. 
So just like playing the children's card game of 'Snap' here is my offering.
However I think that I can 'trump' yours Laurie with my five cherubs to your three.....

Click on the bold type link above to see Laurie's post.

Friday's Funerary Art ~ Art Deco Styles

The following monuments are in the Art Deco style, which reached it's peak during the 1930's, with it's geometric streamlined patterns and shapes. This style was applied to almost everything of that era, architecture, transport, furniture, household items and also included fashion and hairstyles.

It's interesting to see the similarity between this building in Los Angeles, and the monument above it from Southend~on~Sea in England.

  

And this monument in Llandudno in Wales, reminds me of the iconic Chrysler building in New York. 

Even though the headstone is a simple one, this Art Deco vase below reflecs the style of those times.

Angels Guided Her To Heaven

In Loving Memory of our darling

Ivy Grace

the dearly beloved and only child of Charles & Daphne Brown

Born, Gold Mohur Castle, Bombay, 14th December 1886

Died at Limpley Lodge, Llandudno 7th April 1907

Who plucked this flower ? The Master !

And the Gardener held his peace

Weep not for death ! the fount of tears is sealed;

Who knows how bright the inward light

To those closed eyes revealed ~

Who knows what Holy love may fill

The heart that seems so cold and still 

~~~~

Also in Loving Memory

of her Father

Charles Campbell Brown

who died at Weymouth

19th Jan. 1916 in his 59th year

God's Finger touched him and he slept.

Monday Mourning ~ Tomb Styles

Sarcophagus Tomb

Llandudno, Wales

The Sarcophagus tomb has the appearance that it contains the actual body of the departed, however the is not the case, as the body would be interred in a vault below ground. The Sarcophagus style may be simple as these examples here, or very ornate indeed, a common main feature is that the main body of the tomb is tapered towards the bottom and that it stands upon feet, which can often appear to be those of a lion. 

Brompton Cemetery, London

Bunhill Field, London

Wednesday's Children ~ Killed at Roadworks

In Affectionate

Remeberance of

the children of

Robert and Ellen Roberts

of this town

Anne Jane, died March 14th 1867

Aged 9 months

Arthur, died September 1st 1870

Aged 8 months

Rowland, Killed at Stafford

RoadWorks, Wolverhampton

January 14th 1873

Aged 18 years and 9 months

Evan, died March 11th 1873

Aged 15 years

W.C. Arridge Roberts

born Feb 4th 1896

died June 11th 1896

Gone, but not forgotten

  

Fridays Funerary Symbols ~ Curtains

The symbolism of Curtains or Drapes, represents the divide between the world of the living and that of the next, as in the saying ~ Beyond the Veil. Whilst the purpose of a curtain may be that of concealment, it may also be used as a form of protection.

The veil that covered the Ark of the Covenant, was intended to protect mortals from its radiance.

I had not seen such good examples of Curtains until I found these two similar examples.

Surprisingly I found them on the same day, the first one in Wales and the other in England.

  

In Loving Memory of

Elizabeth

the beloved wife of

Benjamin Jones

Green Bank, Augusta St., Llandudno

who died August 17th 1897

Aged 57 years

also of

Benjamin Jones

Died ~ to worn to read

also of

Eliza Jane Evans

Died Jan. 18th 1928

Aged 62 years 

 In Loving Memory of

Sarah Ellen

the dearly beloved daughter of

Andrew & Rachel

Millinger

born January 15th 1872

died August 21st 1875

Jesus called a little child unto him

Thomas Alfred

their dearly beloved son

born May16th 1877 died May17th 1899

Thy Will Be Done

Rachel

the dearly beloved wife of

Andrew Millinger

born June 13th 1844 died October 1918

He giveth his beloved sleep

Also the above named

Andrew Millinger

died April ?  Aged 87 years

Monday Mourning ~ Dolgarrog Disaster

In Loving Memory of

John Stanley Taylor

1 Machno Terrace, Dolgarrog

Aged 29 years

also of

Dorothy Buddug

his wife

Aged 24 years

and

Sylvia Doris

their daughter

Aged 17 months

who lost their lives in the

Dolgarrog Disaster on

November 2nd 1925

The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away

Blessed be the name of the Lord

On the night of the 2nd of November 1925, the failure of two dams caused a flood that swamped the village of Dolgarrog, killing 16 people. Many more villagers could have been killed had they not been in the local theatre watching a film that night.

The disaster was started by the failure of the Eigiau Dam, a gravity dam owned by the Aluminium Corporation.

The water released from the reservoir flooded downstream, and overtopped the Coedty Dam, an embankment dam. This dam also subsequently failed, releasing the huge volume of water that flooded Dolgarrog.

The disaster at Dolgarrog led the British parliament to pass the Reservoirs ~ Safety Provisions ~ Act in 1930 that introduced laws on the safety of reservoirs. This has since been updated, and the current one is the Reservoirs Act, 1975.

In 2004 a £60,000 memorial trail was created, explaining the tragic story to walkers. The trail takes visitors to where the boulders from the damaged dam reside. The project was opened by the last survivor of the dam disaster, Fred Brown, who on that night lost his mother and his younger sister.

Click the bold type link below to see archive footage of the disaster

Film of Dolgarrog Disaster

 

 

 

 

Winged Wheel

In loving memory

of

Beatrice Blore Browne ( Bee )

Born September 26th 1887

Died November 23rd 1921

She feared naught but God

Beatrice ~ Bee ~ was born in Middlesbrough, Yorkshire and died in

Delamere, Penmaenmawr at the age of 34 years old.

Beatrice became a maverick of her time, when she drove a Singer 10hp car up the Old Road on the Great Orme circa 1911. It drew the attention of the press and onlookers, who wondered whether she would make it.

It may have been this, that drew the attention of George Wilkins Browne.
In December 1920, he became the first person to drive a car both up and down Snowdon. He drove up and down the railway track in an Angus Sanderson 14hp car. This event was filmed for cinema audiences. The ascent took 1 hour 22 mins, the descent 1 hour 5 mins.

The link below shows a Pathe Film of the event at the same time.
Driving up Snowdon in the 1920's  

In 1920, Beatrice Blore changed her name by deed poll and added the surname of Browne. Her death in November 1921 at the early age of 34, was due to cancer of the liver and breast, which she had been been suffering from for the previous two years.

Her unique gravestone has kept her memory alive, a reminder of a woman keen to push the boundaries of what it was considered acceptable for women to do.

Cemeteries of the World ~ Great Orme, Llandudno ~ Wales

The cemetery on the Great Orme, Llandudno, Wales and the adjoining churchyard of St. Tudno are well worthy of a mention in 'Cemeteries of the World', if for no other reason than 'Location, Location, Location'. 
And a few really interesting finds......

St.Tudno ~ pronounced Tidno ~ was a 6th century Celtic Monk, who climbed the Welsh, windswept headland of the Great Orme, to spread the message of Christianity and this place has been an active site of worship ever since.

Open air services are held on Sundays from the end of May until the end of September.

The outdoor pulpit stands on some very large plate tombstones, so often seen in the aisles of English Churches.

After discovering this place last year whilst on holiday, my parents said they knew

I would just love this cemetery and so we arranged a family day out 'graveyard stomping' ~ a term I have adopted from Corin White's blog Adventures of a Gravestomper. The already sloping and uneven ground of this cemetery, makes nagivating between the stones all the more challenging and so you really have to watch where you tread.We noticed what appeared to be quite a few other people looking around this interesting place ~ cemetery tourists ~ rather than the usual visitor, who comes to see a loved one.

I shall be posting some of my finds in the very near future, so watch this space.......

     

  

The Holly and the Ivy........

Sacred Cemetery Trees

Holly's significance as a Christian symbol, is connected to it's prickly leaves and likened with Jesus' crown of thorns and the berries with the drops of blood shed for humanity's salvation, as related to in the Christmas carol, 'The Holly and the Ivy'.

Yet even here the reference to these two plants refers to a pre-Christian celebration, where a boy would be dressed in a suit of holly leaves and a girl similarly in ivy, to parade around the village, bringing Nature through the darkest part of the year to re-emerge for another year's fertility.

Like several other native trees it was felt to have protective properties, and there were taboos against cutting down a whole tree. Hollies were frequently left uncut in hedges when these were trimmed. A more arcane reason for this was to obstruct witches who were known to run along the tops of hedges.

The yew tree was another sacred tree of the Druids in pre-Christian times. They possibly observed the tree's qualities of longevity and regeneration (drooping branches of old yew trees can root and form new trunks where they touch the ground), and the yew came to symbolise death and resurrection in Celtic culture.

They will also have been familiar with the toxicity of the tree's needles in particular, which can prove fatal, and which may have further contributed to its connections with death.

The themes of death and resurrection continued into the Christian era, with the custom of yew shoots being buried with the deceased, and boughs of yew being used as 'Palms' in church at Easter. Yew trees have in fact established a popular association with old churches in Britain, to the extent that very old specimens of yew trees are now relatively rare outside of church grounds.

According to Richard Mabey in his Flora Britannica "... no other type of ancient tree occurs so frequently inside church grounds ..." and he goes on to say that he does not know of any other relationship between places of worship and a single tree species existing anywhere else in the Western world.

Yew trees have traditionally been planted beside churches. But in other cases it seems that very old yew trees may have already been growing on a site before the earliest churches were erected there; such as the one beside Fortingall's Church, Perthshire, Scotland may even predate Christianity itself.

Several other yews growing by churches have become famous in their own right, such as the Bleeding Yews of Nevern in Pembrokeshire, Wales.