Sunday Cemetery: The First Cemetery - St Peter's, Preston Park

This is the beginning of a new piece of ongoing research for me: Cemetery Sunday. As my psychopomp work and relationship with spirit continue to deepen, I feel increasingly called to spend time in places associated with death, burial, remembrance and transition.

So as this series unfolds, I want to before I visit somewhere I want to try not to read everything first. I want to know what I sense before I know what I am supposed to find. Where does my attention go? What does my body notice?

And when I get there is there a pull towards a particular tree, building, grave or area of land? Does anything change in the atmosphere? Do I feel welcomed, watched, heavy, peaceful, drawn in, or simply curious?

I wanted to look at each space through several views, documented history, local tradition and my own personal spiritual experiences.

However, I must state that Preston Park is slightly different. Because I have spent soooo much time in the park, churchyard, gardens, manor house. And I believe because this place is always calling me there. There are many layers of experiences I have had in this area of the city. I often wonder if this is why I have ended up living so close to the area…? So, there are many stories I could tell, I will touch on a few in this first post but be prepared I may come back to this place many times!

It is a landscape layered with history, death, religion, family, animals, ritual, folklore and depending on what you believe, and what I have had happen, the possibility of spirits.

First, the land.

Preston as a settlement goes back at least to the time of the Domesday Book in 1086.

Domesday records a church at Preston, and the present St Peter's Church dates from the 13th century, standing on a site associated with two earlier churches. The wider manor itself has medieval origins, with the present Preston Manor developing from a house established on the site in the 13th century.

Preston Park itself is much newer. The land was part of the Preston Manor estate until Brighton Corporation purchased around 67 acres in 1883. The park was laid out in 1883–84 and officially opened in November 1884.

But that is where my questions begin. Because a documented history is not necessarily the beginning of a place. What happened here before written records? What was this landscape before the medieval church? Was any part of it used for ritual or gathering? Was there ever a pre-Christian sacred significance to this land?

At present, I haven't found evidence that allows me to say that St Peter's churchyard was a pagan sacred site. And I don't want to turn a possibility into a fact simply because it fits the story. But I do think it is a fascinating question.

St Peter's Church

Then there is the church itself. A small, beautiful 13th-century flint church, sitting within its churchyard beside Preston Manor. It is Grade II* listed and is now cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust.

Inside are medieval wall paintings that somehow survived both the Reformation and a devastating fire in 1906. And one of them immediately caught my attention.

St Michael weighing souls. There is something almost startlingly appropriate about encountering an image of the weighing of souls in a place where I am researching death, transition and whilst been discovering my own psychopomp work. The medieval image depicts St Michael weighing souls as part of the Last Judgment.

Alongside it is other surviving medieval paintings, including the Nativity and the murder and martyrdom of Thomas Becket.

Foe me this really makes this a place where the spiritual understanding of death, judgement and what happens beyond death has literally been painted onto the walls.

And those paintings have been looking over the church and the premises for centuries, and I find that fascinating.

It’s well worth a visit. I try and go as often as I can to sit peacefully in the church itself.

The churchyard: a place of the dead

It is worth stopping here and making a distinction.

We often use the words graveyard and cemetery interchangeably, but St Peter's is, historically, a churchyard, the burial ground surrounding a church.

And that distinction feels important when thinking about a place like this. A churchyard wasn't simply somewhere people were put after they died. For centuries it was part of the community. People would have worshipped here, walked through here, worked around here, mourned here and returned here to remember those who had gone before them.

At St Peter's, that relationship between the church, the living and the dead is particularly visible.

The present church dates from the 13th century, although a church at Preston is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086. The churchyard therefore sits within a landscape that has been associated with Christian worship and burial for many centuries.

And yet the burial story has a definite ending. Burials at St Peter's churchyard ceased in 1870. That means that when you walk through the churchyard today, you are moving through a burial landscape that has not received ordinary new burials for more than 150 years.

There is something about that which changes how I experience it.

The people beneath the ground aren't simply a constantly expanding collection of the recently dead. This is an older community. Generations layered into the earth.

People whose lives belonged to a very different Preston, before the modern city grew around it, before the park as we know it existed, before the roads and houses that now surround the church.

The Friends of St Peter's have actually preserved a detailed record of the graveyard, including an alphabetical list of graves and a plan allowing visitors to identify individual graves. And there are some remarkable stories within those graves.

One of the most haunting is not a ghost story at all. It is the story of Celia Holloway, who was murdered in 1831. A plaque on the wall beside the churchyard records that portions of Celia's remains were deposited beneath the path after she was brutally murdered. Her husband, John Holloway, and his accomplice Ann Kennet were responsible for her death. John was convicted and executed; Ann was acquitted.

Even the location of Celia's remains is now uncertain. The plaque was reinstated in 1983, but the path referred to no longer exists, leaving questions about exactly where those remains lie. This story has fascinated me, and I get drawn back in to it time and time again. I try to take offerings for Celia’s plaque when I can, as her story is truly sad to read about.

And then there is the physical boundary. The enormous flint wall separating Preston Manor from St Peter's churchyard dates in part to a much older boundary. A document from 1547 records a wall around the churchyard, when Richard Elrington acquired church land for use as an orchard. The relationship between the Manor and churchyard has therefore been physically and historically intertwined for centuries.

In 1981, part of that wall dramatically collapsed, exposing ancient graves.

Think about that for a moment. A wall that had stood between one historic landscape and another failed, and what was underneath became visible again.

The wall was rebuilt in the early 1980s, but the story is a wonderful reminder that landscapes are not static, things change. And sometimes what has been hidden beneath them briefly comes back into view.

There are also four tombs within the churchyard which have their own Grade II listed status, alongside the Grade II* listed church itself. So even the physical memorials here are considered historically significant. These aren't simply old stones. They are part of the record of the place.

And this is where my interest in the soil begins. Because underneath the grass and roots and fallen leaves is the physical remains of a human history that cannot be separated entirely from the land.

I am interested in how different traditions have understood that relationship between earth, death, ancestors and ritual.

And yes, that includes the use of earth or soil from particular places within magical and protective practices. But this is an area I want to approach with enormous respect. I don't believe we should simply take from a graveyard because it feels powerful.

For me, there must be relationship, permission, intention and respect for the dead and for the land. My own experience with the yews at St Peter's has been part of that conversation.

I've encountered them in dreams, and in those dreams, I experienced what felt like permission to take a very small amount of soil for protection work.

That is my experience, not a universal instruction. And I think that distinction matters.

Because working with the dead, the land and the unseen should never be about taking whatever we want because we believe a place is energetically powerful. It should begin with listening.

And then there are the yews...

Which brings me back to those trees. Because standing in this churchyard, surrounded by old graves, an ancient church and yews, it is difficult not to think about the relationship between these things.

Yews have become strongly associated with churchyards in Britain, and St Peter's has its own old yew trees. There is a popular tradition that yews were planted in churchyards because their poisonous foliage would discourage animals from disturbing graves. That explanation is repeated in educational material connected with St Peter's, although the historical reasons for the widespread presence of yews around churchyards are more complicated than one simple explanation.

For me, the significance is less about trying to prove exactly why these trees are here.

It is about what they represent. Long life. Death. Regeneration. Roots reaching down into old ground. Branches continuing upwards. A tree standing between what is beneath us and what is above us. A very fitting companion for a place that sits, quite literally, between the living and the dead.

And then there are the dead.

During my visits to Preston Park, I've had at least three experiences that I understand as psychopomp encounters.

The first was a woman in a grey dress.

Her clothing and presence felt to me as though she belonged somewhere around the 19th century, perhaps the 1800s into the early 1900s. She came to me as I sat on a bench one day after supporting her over to the other side, I was greeted by at least six Blue tit birds all singing at me. I saw this as a confirming sign the work was complete, and the land was happy this lady had been supported, almost a thank you.

Interestingly, a grey-clad female figure is also part of the documented ghost lore of Preston Manor. Brighton Museums records reports of a grey-clad woman appearing at various points in the house, including the boiler room, staircase and roof. I am not saying my experience was the same figure. I don't know that. But it is one of those moments where personal experience and historical record begin to sit beside one another.

The second was a much younger man.

I experienced him as someone who had died relatively recently, within the last few years, and my sense was that his death had involved an overdose. He was looking for solitude and peace, perhaps even forgiveness in the churchyard. He was the youngest son; his parents had had him much later in life and he had this feeling he had been a mistake. His story was very sad when I listened to him, and he could see since dying how he could have made changes. He was passed over peacefully with healing and a knowing he didn’t have to carry that burden anymore. Again, this is my experience, rather than a historical claim that I have independently verified.

And the third was a man I experienced as a gardener.

He came home with me, and I actually supported him to pass over to the other side from my own home. At the time I journalled he was in his 70’s and had been wondering the park perhaps not ready to move on as he felt he needed to complete something or really loved his purpose. That encounter stayed with me because of the sense of connection to the land and the work of tending it. We (my husband and I) both heard his heavy boots in our house.

And then, when I began researching Preston Manor afterwards, I discovered something I hadn't known. Brighton Museums have documented the story of George Cherriman, a gardener who worked at Preston Manor. His family later traced his grave to St Peter's churchyard, where he died in 1955, aged 77.

Is he the man I experienced? I have absolutely no idea. And I'm not going to make that leap. But this is precisely why I am doing this research. Experience first. Research second. Then see where the two meet.

The pet cemetery

And then, tucked inside the walled garden of Preston Manor, is another cemetery.

For animals. The Preston Manor pet cemetery is described by the Young Archaeologists' Club as a Late Victorian and Edwardian pet cemetery and is believed to be unique in Sussex. The surviving graves include at least 16 dogs and three cats in their research, while Brighton Museums currently describes 16 dogs and four cats.

Many of the dogs belonged to Eleanor MacDonald, who lived at Preston Manor until her death in 1903.

The graves begin much earlier than the Edwardian period, with inscriptions dating back to the late 19th century. One grave records a dog called Punch, who died in 1879. Others include Tatters, Soot, Queenie, Pickle and Beauty. Later graves include Jock, Kylin, Peter and George the Pavilion Cat. Some of these pets have their own portraits in the manor house too.

There is something incredibly human about that. We don't only mourn our people. We mourn the animals who shared our homes, our routines and our lives.

And so here, within this one landscape, you have human burial, animal burial, religious imagery, family history, gardening, land and folklore all sitting alongside one another, so you can see how I could go on and on about this one place…

And then there is the Manor.

You can't really talk about this place without acknowledging Preston Manor itself. It has a long history of reported paranormal activity.

There are stories of the Grey Lady. A White Lady associated with a séance held in 1896, who I have mentioned on my social media., The sad story of a woman supposedly buried in unconsecrated ground.

Plus, a disembodied hand, a phantom child…The history is fascinating, but it is also contested. Brighton Museums themselves note that the medium involved in the famous séance, Ada Goodrich Freer, was later exposed as a fraud and that questions remain around the skeleton discovered at the Manor. Again, the house is well worth a visit. I am actually taking part in a paranormal investigation there next month.

So, what am I actually looking for?

Not proof. Not a collection of spooky stories. I’m interested in place. I have so many questions about places all the time like...

What happens when you spend time somewhere that has held generations of human lives? What does the land retain? How do we understand the relationship between burial and sacred space? Why did certain places become places of burial? What came before the structures we recognise? How have different traditions worked with soil, trees, ancestors and the dead? And what happens when we approach these places not as tourists looking for something frightening, but as practitioners willing to listen?

This is the beginning of my Cemetery Sunday series.

I will visit these places first through sensation, then through history and then through research. And I'll share all three with you. Sometimes they may agree. Sometimes they may contradict one another. And sometimes I suspect I'll be left with more questions than answers.

Which, honestly, is exactly where I want to be, because the veil isn't something I want to conquer or beat… I want to work in and wit it in a relationship and with respect. I also believe we are not meant to know everything…

And Preston Park felt like a very fitting place to begin.

 A list of resources can be shared on request.