Hollow Places: An Unusual History of Land and Legend by Christopher Hadley

Author:Christopher Hadley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2019-08-07T23:00:00+00:00

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I know this story to be true because Sheldon told his daughter; Rosa.

Rosa told it to her daughter Estella.

Estella; in turn, told it to her son, William.

He then told me, his daughter; Patricia.

When my father finished this story he put out his hand and said, ‘This is the hand, that has touched the hand, that has touched the hand, that shook the hand of Abraham Lincoln.’

—Patricia Polacco, Pink and Say, 1994

‘Many years ago, when the church was being restored, the gigantic bones of Shonke were discovered,’ begins the earliest account of the tomb’s opening. It was written some forty years after the event by one L. H. S., and published in The Cliftonian, the school magazine of Clifton College near Bristol. L. H. S. had spoken to a local farmer who told him:

A finger bone, which was twice the size allowed to mortal man, was taken home by a farmer, who was then churchwarden. But in the silent hours of the night, the spirit of Shonke so troubled his conscience that on the next morning he restored the bone to its rightful abode.

The 1888 letter to the Hertfordshire Mercury, which prompted Woolmore Wigram to write about the yew tree, also elicited a response from one W. H. N. of Watford: ‘I remember some twenty years ago hearing a patriarchal old villager say that he either remembered or heard that on an excavation being made under the wall, near the monument, that bones supposed to be Shonkes’ were found.’

W. B. Gerish tracked down W. H. N. – William Henry Norris – to ask him if the bones had been put back where they came from, only to find that he was too late and that the old man had died. The bricklayer Thomas Tinworth, whose gravestone is today in sight of the crosses on the buttresses, remembered that his father explored the tomb in about 1835 during some repairs: ‘He found that the recess went a long way down, and in digging into it he found some very large human bones.’ This would suggest that Shonks’ bones may well have been beneath the foundations.

The date the tomb was first opened is not certain. Tinworth said it was 1835, while the churchwardens’ accounts show substantial bricklaying bills for 1832 and again in 1834. As we have already seen, J. C. Buckler drew the tomb in 1833, and drew it in a way that suggests he had a very clear view of the tomb slab – had it been removed from the niche?

Mary Ann Wisbey said it was opened in 1836. As a young girl, Mary Ann, a local farmer’s daughter, sat with her feet on the tomb in the pew that belonged to Brent Pelham Bury. Sometime over the next seventy years, Mary Ann would reinvent herself as Marion, that name most resonant of English folk heroines. She was Marion Hudson, a retired housekeeper, when she was interviewed by a local newspaper reporter in 1903, who described her as ‘an extremely interesting octogenarian’.

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