The elegance of the local stone carver’s craft is not to be seen only in the lettering
(John Betjeman)

A Fool’s Errand

Arriving home on Templar day, 13 October 1999, having had to extend my stay away, I hoped very much that when I got my second set of photographs developed they were going to be better than the first lot of dark, indecipherable images.
    I had been away in Wallasey, and my forwarded post contained a letter from your editor suggesting I include photos from Liverpool to send to him with some I had collected elsewhere in August (1999). There were just a few more days left to me. It was going to be simple to “ferry ’cross the Mersey” and walk up to the Anglican cathedral, but I had no camera. A little window-shopping was enough to persuade me that I had insufficient means of purchasing one. I phoned home for help and was recommended to get a ‘throwaway’ camera. Having been assured of the fair quality of photograph this particular brand of camera produced, I set off early next day to be in the cemetery during Eastern sunlight. The forecast was good.
    The cathedral cemetery was constructed in a rather ‘Highgate’ style on its north face with a range of mausoleums over which a broad path gave entrance to other vaults set into the sandstone. All are now closed over, with the exception of a hole at ground level – perhaps made by a morbid person or persons. Looking in and down there appeared to be the tops of two vault graves. The cemetery, badly vandalised by graffiti, is in a valley perhaps nearly as deep as the cathedral is high, and the perimeter is marked by dense overgrowth. Of the graves exposed to morning sun there is every chance of a good picture, but as for those within the greenery… I began to feel I was taking the risk of a bit of a fool’s errand.
    My father had worked on this cathedral when I was a small boy. It must have been in this very valley where I then stood and marvelled among huge blocks of Hollington sandstone, that two men given one big enough saw could cut right through the biggest block. All this was a long time ago.
    All these years later, how had I come to be poking about the gravestones, picking and pressing and pushing my way into dark wild bushes and hanging ivy with an incredibly cheap camera and a carrier bag containing a telescopic umbrella and the Daily Telegraph? So the council employee on his grass-cutter going round and round the central area must have wondered as I periodically emerged with mud-caked trouser legs and adjusting my eyes to the light.
    Thus had it come to pass… I had subscribed to FMT from its first issue and eventually wrote to express concern for the fast deteriorating condition of a local masonic gravestone known locally as ‘the pirate grave’ because of the skull and crossbones featuring prominently among other masonic devices. The editor asked if I had a photograph. So I began to cast about in my memory regarding other masonic stones I had seen locally (principally at Newton Heath and Mellor) and recalled sketches done in Liverpool years ago.
    Opportunity presenting itself by way of summer vacs, I asked my youngest daughter, who uses a good camera in her degree work, to accompany me on days out to photograph the stones.

An Angry Disappointment

As we approached St Lawrence, Denton, we saw scaffolding at the west end and feared that it would prevent access to the ‘pirate grave’ just outside the door. Things were worse than that! There was small hardcore set fast over all the graves at that place. We were able to enter the church and a workman found us. He volunteered to connect us to the rector by mobile phone, but the rector was out. When I (politely) expressed my feelings about the state we had found the grave in, he said: “It’s all right, it has been recorded by a rubbing.” As we talked further, he mentioned the story that the grave belonged to a workman who fell off the roof and has his final resting-place underneath where he had landed. Where had I heard that before? At Gloucester Cathedral, beneath the ‘mason’s set square’… Concerning the apprentice pillar of Rosslyn… and here, and there.
    We continued immediately to the Newton Heath stone, again just outside the west door of the church, but of ironstone as opposed to the limestone at Denton. Noting our interest, a gentleman was kind enough to take me round and through the vestry, past the rehearsing choir people – who paid us no heed – to get a step-ladder for my daughter to climb and try for a flat shot of the complete stone as it is no longer than the average ledger. “The story goes,” said our friend, “that a workman fell off the tower and is buried beneath that stone.”
    The task done and the ladder returned, my daughter noticed quite a few stones carved with a heart, one in the palm of a hand. [Editor’s note: readers may compare this with the identical image carved on the wall of the Templar (?) cave at Royston. FMT Issue 3] “Perhaps that particular one has an Ulster, or an heraldic significance,” I offered, “It’s more likely that a local stonemason used hearts as customary for his time and/or place.”
    On the way back, seeing Droylsden cemetery, my daughter wished to stop and look, “just for general interest”. We found a tau cross and a Templar cross incised on Latin crosses, and quite a few squares and compasses.
    The second shooting was easier now I knew the locations, and the flash on the new ‘cheapo’ camera worked perfectly. I snapped away, at an eye over square and compass, eye in triangles over square and compass, square and compass and man in the moon with stars, square and compass, plumb and keys.

666

As I looked at a felt marker pen pentangle and 666 on a small flat tomb with a three stepped cross design, suddenly, a football crashed down through the rhododendron canopy over me. This totally unexpected event unnerved me momentarily, but I had passed some lads enjoying a knockabout on my way down from the oratory. One of them had overshot the goal and I could hear him running down and through the short tunnel to retrieve the ball.
    I went and lay on my back so as to get an upside-down shot of a stone surmounted by the cathedral tower very high up and away off. This stone, like others in the vicinity, was a memorial to an American, some oblong in shape with a five-pointed star on the horn of each tympanum. One column had on one side a snake holding its tail in its mouth [the alchemical ouroboros Ed.], enclosing a butterfly [the soul? Ed.].
    In this place lie the remains of many seafaring people. My mind’s eye pictured a Liverpool portside full of tall masted fully rigged ocean-goers. There was smoke in the air from the funnels and chimneys and the sound of dock-work and carriages…
    One name, on a grave without any marks save its lettering, was of a 19 year old who drowned on his way from Philadelphia in 1834. I tell you this for a peculiar, but connected reason. (I have only come across this name once before – an old lady in a nursing home who has recently paid her subs to her club). On seeing the young man’s name, I instantly thought myself back to the masonic tomb at Mellor in Greater Manchester when my daughter and I had been there in the summer.

The Mellor Mystery

The boy’s name was KEAY, and I was reading it as two words: KEY and KAY, KAY and KEY. About two months back, we had found three masonic stones at Mellor, one in the graveyard with square and compasses on a Celtic armed cross, and two near the south corner of St Thomas’s by the tower. Of the latter stones, the upright against the wall is ‘The Brierley Tombstone’ (dated 1785), while the post or pillar (with dates of 1856, 1843, 1849) holds the railing around the ‘Brierley’. Raymond Richards’ monumental Old Cheshire Churches (Batsford, 1947) speaks only of the Brierley Tombstone and says nothing of the pillar.
    “Thomas”, says the author, “was very learned and advanced in the mysteries of masonry”. He “enjoyed bad health”, often on the sick funds of the lodge, and was accused by some of malingering. He therefore had a stone coffin made to fit only his body, with “I am belied” on the lid. Coffin and lid he then placed on the grave he had purchased for himself. The Rector ordered interment of the lid and coffin to prevent sightseers from coming any more. So Brierley had his tombstone, complete for his age and deathday, set on his grave.
    The book then gives another puzzle about its own account. I cannot understand how the Rector thought the cipher was Hebrew! There is Hebrew – on the pillar – in which two roots can be found, “conceal and secret” and “chest, or ark”.
    It is quite easy to ‘skip read’ the pillar’s enigmatic message and not notice that TRUTH BEARETH THE KAY …A LIE BEARETH THE KEY (my italics), or the spelling of THEIRIN. I am left wondering if it’s possible that the Brierley story as we have here, is not just a bit ‘workman falling off the roof’…
    However, compared to the pillar, the tomb is an open gate. The cipher uses three masonic alphabets and a code of English. Back home, I asked a mason (and Templar) friend if the plain arch and the patterned arch represented ‘rough’ and ‘finished’, or was perhaps a number reference. He did not think so, and had nothing to say about a possible geometry in the lettering of the pillar.
    Looking straight up from tomb and pillar, I pointed out to my daughter the rough ashlar near the gable and commented that there was no ‘finished’, or any other, on the north side. A boy standing by then invited himself to remark: “That’s where the workman fell from and died, so they buried him in this grave here.”
    I am now led to references that the local and Manchester lodges extended activities to Birkenhead and Liverpool, and that Ashton-under-Lyne has a specially fine masonic memorial in the church. I intend to investigate further, and expect that at Ashton, the workmen fell from the ceiling.