IN May I had a lovely bike ride through Great Ayton. I think I'd really gone to search out fireplates in Stokesley but carried on into Ayton where I found a couple of sundials - as tomorrow's Echo Memories informs a wondering world.
Ayton is an intriguing place. If I remember rightly, it has two cricket pitches - I'm sure I spent hours waiting for my team-mates to turn up only for them to send someone around from the other pitch to collect me as they'd worked out that I'd got pathetically lost. And it has two churches.
The 12th Century old church of All Saints seems good enough for anyone to me, with its lovingly painted dial above the door. This, apparently, was James Cook's church in the 1730s and 1740s, and somewhere in the yard his mother and siblings are buried.
I, though, stumbled across the headstones belonging to the Sayer family - perhaps the Cooks knew them - from the late 18th Century. They were covered in rhymes. If you follow this intermittent blog, you'll know that collecting churchyard rhymes is a recurring theme.
The first Sayer to succumb was Jane, daughter of Mark and Mary. She died in "ye 16th year of her Age" on February 17, 1765, and her headstone says:
When our great God called her away
She was too good on earth to stay
She's gone while we do here remain
Hoping in hea'n to meet again.
Four-and-a-half years later, on September 25, 1769, the Sayers lost another daughter, Elizabeth "aged 28 Years". Her headstone says:
Kind angels watch this sleeping dust
Till Jesus comes to raise the just
Then may she make with sweet surprise
And in her Saviour's image rise.
Nearby is the headstone of their father, Mark, who died on June 24, 1784, aged 81:
Near to this place his mortal body lies
In hopes through Christ in glory to rise
He lived to die in Christ he put his trust
To rise through him triumphant with the just.
Mark shares the headstone with a son, probably Charles, and finally, down the bottom and weathering badly, Mary, his wife, who was 83 when she died. There is probably a rhyme for her, too, but this looked to me to have been lost by the passing of time.
The rhymes intrigue me. Part of my job as a journalist is fitting text into boxes on pages - we can't have any "overmatter" hanging over the edges. But the stonemasons who did the two daughters' headstones carved so beautifully flowerily but still left random words or syllables - aga-in - hanging over. By the time they got to Mark 13 years later, the masons had learned the error of their ways and the lines fit comfortably on the stone.
The other intriguing aspect is who wrote, or chose, the rhymes. I have a sneaking suspicion that it was Mark himself. I wonder at what point in life you decide - like Jimmy Saville did - that death is looming and that today is the day I'm going to sit down and write my epitaph.
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