In Perpetuity: Landscapes of Memory Against the Fenland

Ramsey St Mary’s lies three miles from Ramsey, on the threshold of the Cambridgeshire Fens — a flat, formerly marshy terrain that poses challenges for both the living and the dead. This post argues that the Fenland’s environmental fragility challenges Christian ideals of perpetual rest, revealing tensions between faith, memory and environmental challenge.

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” these are the words uttered at the committal of the deceased’s body into the ground during a Church of England service.[1] Placing the body back to the earth, to return to it, seems to be at the essence of burial. An act of reconnecting man with nature, specifically with the earth created by G-d. Yet, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, communities worked fervently to claim these spaces as their own — not just in life, but in perpetuity. Christian doctrine taught that humanity would be judged at the Second Coming of Christ. All who have ever lived will be raised from the dead, their spirit reunited with their body and all will be judged by Jesus for their actions.[2] This belief, held in a highly religious landscape, would have influenced the importance of the preservation of the burial landscape to be ‘in perpetuity’.

In perpetuity simply means forever. This is apt for the religious environment in which people lived and interacted in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. This matters as the landscape and ground were envisioned to be the lasting burial space of these individuals. In Victorian society, death grew as an industry, leading to the proliferation of memorial culture and its centrality to the experience of death and dying. These monuments, like those found in Ramsey St Mary’s, indicate the importance of the landscape becoming one of memory. Burials transform a landscape of mere geography into one charged with memory. These spaces were sold as burial space for ‘perpetuity’ – in the hopes they will be occupied until the second coming. Yet, their presence reflects a shift from religious to secular understandings of death and remembrance. These headstones stand from their placement in the 19^th-century until today in the 21^st-century but are now obscured by the environment, which is gradually reclaiming the burial space—erasing the human attempt at permanence.

However, headstones and their memorial landscape face greater challenges within the shifting East Anglian environment. The changing landscape of the Fenland makes permanence increasingly difficult to maintain. The Fens are areas of former marshland that have been dried out and used by those who have settled here over time. Unlike most areas, the Fens are very low-lying lands, often only mere meters above sea level. This presents a number of issues for the land’s future against ecological changes such as climate change, with global warming driving rising sea levels and unpredictable rainfall patterns. This will lead to greater volumes of water being present in the lands, and contribute to the issue not just facing the living, but the dead too.

The churchyard of Ramsey St Mary’s Church is one such cemetery that will experience issues with maintaining these permanent landscapes of memory and death in the face of climate change. Surrounded by ditches as a barrier against the harsh landscape, this church and its burial space is posed for the challenge the Fen environment presents.

The local church’s foundation was a story of land reclamation, providing space for living and the dead. St Mary’s recognition as a parish came in 1860.[3] However, its church was founded in 1858 by Emma Fellowes, the widow of William Henry Fellowes of Ramsey, who had served as MP for Huntingdon (1796-1807) and Huntingdonshire (1807-1830).[4] It was likely prompted due to the increased population driven by the draining of Whittlesey Mere, reclaiming land, enabling more people to settle in areas like Ramsey St Mary’s, furthering town developments. With these communities came new communal centres, like the church. Its development highlights the need for a cohesive space for both the living and the dead. Reclaiming this living landscape and replacing it with one for the deceased showed the importance of temporality to the living for the dead.

Churches acted as communal spaces, not just for the living but for the dead too, as such they needed the infrastructure to preserve them. The Christian background of those settled in Ramsey St Mary’s in the 19^th century would have led to burial space becoming a non-negotiable. Burying the dead was a fundamental practice not just for spiritual necessity (preserving the body for judgement) but for the family too. Archaeologists and historians like Parker-Pearson have famously commented that the ‘dead don’t bury themselves’.[5] Arguments like this show the importance of the land and the memory and emotion associated with it by the living. The living place their loved one in the churchyard to both bid them farewell, but to preserve their body for future salvation. As such, the defensive measures of Ramsey St Mary’s churchyard show the community’s preparation against the Fenland in which they lived. Since the 19th century, the land has subsided 4 meters, impacting the built landscape, as seen on the Church itself.[6] These preparations were therefore necessary to secure the landscape of memory crafted within the burial space. Yet, it has not been successful to secure it for perpetuity.

Today, the cemetery displays a plethora of memory landscape deterioration. This ‘landscape’ is composed of the headstones acting as markers of the deceased’s burial, but also as markers of the individuals they were. Once these markers would have stood, visible and signalling the presence of the deceased. Now these markers are often at an angle, covered by plants, or sinking into the earth. (Figures 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8)

These markers show not just the landscape of memory being dismantled, but also signals the environmental changes occurring beneath. Headstones are crucial evidence for the disruption of the landscape – both physically in the environmental changes, and emotionally through the memory destroyed with the loss of these spaces and monuments. As established above, climate change and the subsidence of the land in the Fens will have caused shifts in the position of the deceased interred in the landscape. For the 19^th century burials, their hopes of a location made permanent are potentially undermined.

The Marxist historian E.P. Thompson argues that history should be considered from “below”.[7] Gravestones are one such tool for this. From graves we can piece together the lives of individuals, map families and consider the changes of communities over time. Family history is often lost when generations of relations do not keep written, visual or video records of family stories. The loss of such personal information, narratives of events not kept beyond census data, makes it harder to piece together the past. Often there is little evidence left behind of everyday people in this period, so their headstones become important symbols of the person they were perceived as being. The importance here is ‘perceived’, as the dead are interred by the living, and decisions surrounding interment often are by those who knew them best.

Reduction of headstone visibility highlights the challenges of perpetuity as a burial rite in ecologically challenging areas such as the Fens. However, the Fens are not alone in this issue. Areas such as New Orleans, former swamp and marshland, also face flooding issues, which have informed their burial practices. Saint Louis Cemetery No.1, the oldest existing cemetery in New Orleans, features 18^th and 19^th century burials all above ground. This is a precautionary measure as the city is susceptible to flooding – which would result in an unsanitary environment for not just the deceased to remain in, but pose a risk to the living too. Environmentally responsive burial planning is not unique to the Fens, but it does inform how the living can craft their memorial landscape. New Orleans’ architects crafted cities of the dead, whilst the local architects and builders of Ramsey St Mary’s crafted local hubs with the deceased commemorated in the same practices as those of other flatlands and non-fen areas. Ramsey St Mary’s cemetery adheres to tradition. It refuses to break away from the expectation of interment in the ground and, as such, risks the preservation of the memorial landscape it set out to secure.

To conclude, the Ramsey St Mary’s cemetery highlights the memorial landscape's role as being substantially tied to the conservation of the built landscape amongst ecological changes. The efforts of nineteenth-century religious communities to create memorial spaces in churches have, over time, been reduced to overgrown, hidden and isolated communities of the dead. The destruction of markers removes the deceased from the built environment. It problematises the past as the very people we wish to understand are removed from the record. As such, the case of cemeteries like Ramsey St Mary’s shows how the Christian ideal of permanence in death is problematised by the landscape’s refusal to preserve the marks of the deceased. It stands not just as a burial site, but as an indicator of 19th-century belief that memory can outlast the earth.

Images:

Figure 1: The ditch on the left-hand side of the Church from the front-facing entrance. (Photo: F Cushman 2025)

Figure 2: The elevation of the churchyard grounds, as pictured from the front left of the church. (Photo: F Cushman 2025)

Figure 3: Ditch to the right of the front of the church showing the loss of headstones to the land. (Photo: F Cushman 2025)

Figure 4: Side steps of Ramsey St Mary’s parish church highlighting landscape changes. (Photo: F Cushman 2025)

Figure 5: Headstone on the right side of the church showing landscape changes. (Photo: F Cushman 2025)

Figure 6: The ditch on the right side of the church shows overgrown plants and loss of headstones to the environment. (Photo: F Cushman 2025)

Figure 7: The ditch on the right side of the church shows overgrown plants and loss of headstones to the environment. (Photo: F Cushman 2025)

Figure 8: The ditch on the right side of the church shows overgrown plants and loss of headstones to the environment. (Photo: F Cushman 2025)

 

 

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[1] An Order for the Burial of the Dead (Alternative Services: Series One), Church of England, n.d. Available at: https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/common-worship/death-and-dying/order-burial-dead (Accessed: 3rd July 2025).

[2] 1 Corinthians 15: 42-44 and 52 (NIV). 

[3] GB Historical GIS / University of Portsmouth, History of Ramsey St Marys in Huntingdonshire, Map and description, A Vision of Britain through Time. Available at: https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/24733 (Accessed: 3^rd July 2025).

[4] "Fellowes, William Henry (1769–1837), of Ramsey Abbey, Hunts. and Haverland Hall, Norf. History of Parliament Online". www.histparl.ac.uk.

[5] M. Parker Pearson, "Social change, ideology and the archaeological record," in Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology, ed. M. Spriggs. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp.59-71.

[6] Holme Fen Posts, The Great Fen Project. Available at: https://www.greatfen.org.uk/about-great-fen/heritage/holme-fen-posts (Accessed: 3 July 2025).

[7] E. P., Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), preface.