Cemetery Sunday #3 - Stanmer Church, East Sussex

There are places where you arrive and immediately feel the weight of what has happened there and then there are places where something feels strangely alive. Stanmer was the latter.

I parked in the lower part of Stanmer on a very rainy Wednesday. The nudge to go hear had come through a few people mentioning it and me then remembering the very small and understated graveyerd and church. So on this wet day as I approached Stanmer Church, from sevreal fields away, I started to get visuals, I knew what I was seeing were not people physically there. In the spirit world, I became aware of children playing on the green. One little girl stood out to me particularly strongly, she felt around five to seven years old and i has given the name Annabell. I

But I picked up the name Mary as well, alongside that came the impression of a woman connected with teaching, a teacher, perhaps even a headmistress. I made a mental note of it. I didn't try to work it out. I didn't research anything before going. I just noticed what was there as i was approaching.

There was something very different about Stanmer. It didn't feel like a place where people had simply lived and died.

It felt lived in, full of movement. The children, but also families, work, land and ceremony. I had a strong sense that the land around the church had been used for growing crops, working the land and marking the seasons. There was something almost ritualistic about it, not necessarily a formal religious ritual. More the feeling of people being deeply connected to the land they depended upon. Such as planting, growing. harvesting. giving thanks and marking the turning of the year and living according to what the land allowed.

It was a feeling I couldn't yet explain, so, again, I wrote it down. And then I went to the churchyard.

THE GRAVES

Stanmer Church stands in a beautiful, almost strangely contained landscape. The churchyard is enclosed by flint walls, with mature trees and old graves. At the western end are two yew trees, and there are grave markers dating back to at least the late eighteenth century.

There has been a church here since at least the 13th century. The present building, however, is Victorian, rebuilt in 1838. So what I was standing in wasn't simply a Victorian churchyard, it was a much older sacred and community landscape beneath a newer building.

And then I started noticing the names, one of them stopped me.

Mary Davey. Mary. The name I had picked up before I knew anything about the people buried there.

I don't know if the Mary I sensed was Mary Davey. I won't claim that. But I stood there for a moment and wondered. Who was she? What was her life? What did this place mean to her? And then there was another name very close by Rhoda Susanna Dubbin.

This one made me stop for longer because the woman I had sensed before entering the churchyard had felt connected to teaching.

Rhoda Susanna Dubbin was not simply connected to Stanmer. She was a schoolmistress at Falmer National School, which it stated on her grave, and family history records show her photographed with the schoolchildren around the early 1900s. She retired around 1910, and a silver plate was given to her to mark her retirement. Her family also had a direct connection to Stanmer. Her father, James Moss, came to the Brighton area in the 1850s when he took a position as coachman at Stanmer House. Rhoda's gravestone is in Stanmer churchyard.

So here was the name. The teacher. The Stanmer connection. The churchyard. And the impression I had received before I knew any of it. Again, I don't think we should rush to say: “This was Rhoda.” Maybe. Maybe not. But this is precisely the kind of thing I find fascinating, because the experience came first, then the research came afterwards and sometimes the two touch.

And then I started looking at Stanmer's history through a different lens. Because the children I had seen didn't feel random to me.

Stanmer was once a working village, the wider estate contains a long history of people living and working on the land. The medieval settlement was closely connected to agriculture, and historical records show that Stanmer was once a much larger community than the tiny village we see today.

At one point, the medieval village had around 25 taxpayers. By 1664, only three houses were recorded. The landscape had changed dramatically. Later, the Pelham family reshaped Stanmer into an estate landscape, eventually creating a new village for workers.

The green, the church, the houses, the estate and the fields weren't separate things, they were one community and children would of been part of that community. They would have played here, walked here, gone to schoolm helped their families, known the fields and lanes, been brought to the church for baptisms and, for some, eventually returned to its churchyard.

That doesn't prove the children I perceived were spirits of children who once lived here. But it gives another layer to the experience. I wasn't standing in an empty landscape, but it was a chance to acknowledge I was standing in a place where generations of children really had lived.

A LANDSCAPE OF CROPS, BOUNDARIES AND RITUAL

The feeling I had about the land has also stayed with me, because Stanmer's history reaches much further back than the village and church. Archaeology shows human activity in the wider park going back to Neolithic times. There are Bronze Age barrows and a prehistoric cross-ridge dyke, an ancient land boundary, in Stanmer Great Wood. The wider landscape contains evidence of people shaping, working and moving through this land over thousands of years. And that makes my initial feeling of land ritual particularly interesting.

I can't say that people were performing the specific rituals I sensed, there isn't evidence for that. Although there was an intreasting stone in the graveyard that I sensed had been used for such things…

But this is unquestionably a landscape shaped by agriculture, boundaries, seasons and human relationship with the land for a very long time. Even the old village depended upon it. it was the survival of the community. And perhaps that is what I was feeling. Not one particular ritual, but the accumulated imprint of people living in relationship with the land.

THE OLD CHURCH

There is another layer here that I really love. The church standing in front of me is not the original church, a church stood here during the medieval period, with records taking it back to at least 1232. The earlier church was demolished and rebuilt on the same site in 1838.

So even though the building looks relatively young compared with some of the places I've visited, the ground beneath it isn't. There are older yews and older graves. Which means older memories.

AND THE GHOST STORIES?

Stanmer does have ghost lore. One recorded local legend tells of a phantom priest said to haunt Stanmer Park, supposedly connected with an old smuggling story. But interestingly, I haven't found a well-established traditional ghost story specifically about children appearing around Stanmer House or the church. And I think that's important, because it would be very easy to find a story online and make my experience fit it.

That's not what Cemetery Sunday is about. I saw children. I felt a particular little girl. I picked up the name Mary. I sensed a teacher. And then I found Mary Davey and I found Rhoda Susanna Dubbin — a woman who really was a teacher, connected to the wider Stanmer community, and whose grave is in the churchyard. That is the mystery and I don't always need to turn it into certainty.

So who was the little girl? Why did she stand out?

Was Mary Davey connected to what I experienced? Was Rhoda part of it?

Was I picking up on the history of the community rather than one individual? Or was my mind translating something more subtle into people I could recognise? I don't know, but I keep coming back to the image of those children on the green and that one girl.

Stanmer really holds an echo of life. That is what interests me most about these places, the dead are not the only stories held in an old churchyard. Sometimes it is the living that remain in the landscape too.

Also so far each place i have been drawn to is linked to a manor or large home… which all have hauntings… a patten starting to emerge perhaps?