Hey, y’all, it’s Weird Wednesday! Where on some Wednesdays, I blog about weird stuff and give writing prompts.
Today: Corpse Roads and Coffin Stones
Welcome to Weird Wednesday! Today we’re wandering weird roads that go to graveyards. Sound fun? Let’s go!
Corpse roads are paths over which one carries a coffin to its final resting place. Like crossroads, corpse roads are physical places with metaphysical properties, according to folklore. Such pathways are found all over the world, but the origin of corpse roads in Great Britain is a little more political than you might expect.
Back in late medieval times, the population was growing, so people were building new churches and their associated graveyards. Some established churches insisted that new outlying churches were under their spiritual (and financial) control. Thus, they had to use the graveyards of the mother church, even though they were sometimes quite a distance away.
So how to get the dearly departed to their final destination? Unless you had money for transportation, you and a few friends had to carry the coffin. Thus, paths sprung up between far flung churches and central cemeteries. These paths were called corpse roads, funeral roads, coffin walks, lych ways (lych or lich is a Germanic word for corpse), and other similar names. Eventually, the outlying churches did break away and make their own cemeteries, so corpse roads ceased to be used, though some are still preserved today as footpaths.
Often, corpse roads were as straight as possible through rough terrain, because, well, coffins are pretty heavy. In fact, sometimes large stones along the way were used as places to rest the dearly deceased for a while. These are called “coffin stones.”
But there may have been other reasons for straight roads and resting stones.
Check out the blog post for the whole story and some writing prompts, such as:
The long and winding road. Not all stories about a corpse road have to be creepy. You could have a family drama that takes place in one scene: the hours-long journey over a corpse road. Let the reader glean the family’s backstory: its loves, arguments, history, and future. All crystalized around the death of someone central to the family, and the difficult march where they share the burden of carrying the coffin.
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