North Wales church yards are running out of space to bury the dead.
http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/2011/05/16/north-wales-churchyards-running-out-of-space-to-bury-the-dead-55578-28699491/This story got me thinking, churches such as St Marys have been around since the 12th century, St Benedicts in Gyffin may be older than that. Yet when you go and look at the graves in both these church yards the majority of them date from the early 1800s onwards. Off the top of my head I think I've seen one or two which date from the 1700s and only those buried inside the churches date any earlier. Which begs the question where is everybody else buried? Where are all the people who lived in Conwy throughout the 13th century up until the 17th century. Four hundred years worth of people vanished......where? This question could be asked in all parishes throughout Britain I suppose.
So what happened? Were they all buried in long forgotten unmarked graves? If this is the case I find it hard to believe that not a single person was important enough to warrant a headstone of some sort, even the dead in the Neolithic age used stone markers, you only have to see the Cairns and tombs to realise how they revered the dead.
Are our dead up on the mountains, surely not all of them.
Do church yards wait a given time and re-use the sacred ground, this is a possibility, it could have been common place to do so in the past but in this day and age it would be considered out of the question perhaps. I know that a lot of people were cremated but not all. So where are they?
