Tag Archives: Berrow

Jesse’s gravestone in the Churchyard

From an article in the Weston Mercury in 1978.

In the 1840s a reporter called Joseph Leech working for a Bristol newspaper toured the Burnham area on horseback.
One evening he decided to go to the evening service at Berrow church. He left his horse at Burnham and walked to Berrow which took him longer that he expected. By the time he arrived having waded through knee deep sand drifts the service had already started.

“the desert Sahara like aspect of the Church’s surroundings – the churchyard which was only the desolate slopes of a sand hill, where no friendly yew could live to shelter the graves of the sleepers, and where even a few blades of grass refused to cloth the little barrows.
I expected to find the congregation of a correspondingly rude and primitive character , some half a dozen Robinson Crusoes and their men fridays, in tarpaulin suits, or at most a select gathering of civilised shrimp fishers. But I was surprised to see instead, not only a fair gathering of farmers and their families, but actually a small sprinkling of the latest Parisian fashions including the full blown white necktie and the dainty walking stick worn by ladies. Great, certainly is the enterprise of the modern mode.
Here when one would have expected to find customs and costumes of the ancient Britons – blue paint and rabbit skins still lingering before resigning for ever the island in favour of Manchester cottons and wash prints – to meet instead the “newest thing” out in the Longchamps or the walk to Vichy was to me, I confess, astonishing, recalling to mind the remark of a modern traveller in Egypt who suddenly encountered a nursery governess and a group of young children at the Great Pyramid of Cheops that there was no place so remote where you might not be reminded of Brighton.”

There was no harm in a pretty little cravat under a pretty dimpled chin, he went on, and he was equally delighted to find the service so decorously and devoutly performed.

“At Berrow-super-rabbit-burrows you had a neat little interior – too rich perhaps in whitewash and yellow ochre for fastidious ecclesiolgists – pews and benches cleanly kept, and a harmonium nicely played while a little choir of healthy rosy faces under rustic straw hats surrounded it and chanted and sang the canticles, hymns etc brightly and boldly. “