Even in the best-kept and most estimable of Horsingdon’s boneyards, you are likely to encounter some unkempt, rewilded corner where a few graves lie overgrown and untended. Curiously, with a small number of these plots one may discover that, on closer inspection, their cracked and crooked headstones have surfaces worn clean, such that they possess no inscription or other visible signifier as to the precise identity of whose resting place they designate. Curiouser still is the fact that such erasures are not the always the product of time and the elements: for some of these gravestones, it is clear that the names of the departed have been intentionally effaced.
Were one to investigate further, it is likely that one would discover in the parish records a remarkable fact: that these blank gravestones typically mark the resting place of a deceased member of the Boreham family - or of one who, in life, was closely associated with that strange and sorcerous lineage. However, if such excisions represent an attempt to erase from the history and collective memory of the region the lingering influence of ancient sorceries, it would seem that have yet to prove efficacious.
Local conjurors and cunning folk have often favoured the use of grave dirt gathered from these seemingly-anonymous but ill-regarded plots in their ritual observances, sabbatical liturgies, and herbal ministrations. Thus, by means of the dirt of the dead, the primordial magicks and and folk mythographies deeply-rooted within the district’s loam are themselves given dispensation to rise again from their ancient barrows to haunt the present.
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