A flying congregation had assembled by the church gate. We approached on foot, coming on the coffin route, a straight path through fields along which pall bearers had once carried the dead from the nearby village of Ridgmont.

Mourners might have walked through this meadow after the hay had been cut, as we did, and looked down at the grass laid out in strips to dry where it fell. Did a passage from the Bible come to mind? “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall.”

‘Why house martins had chosen to gather close to the churchyard quickly became apparent.’ Photograph: Sarah Niemann

Any thoughts of death were soon dispelled by a flock of house martins scything through life. Why they had chosen to gather close to the churchyard quickly became apparent. Tractor wheels had churned out a shallow three-metre trench at the entrance to the next field and it was half full of water. The birds were stacked in the air above this trough of mud like aircraft over a runway, and they took turns to swoop down and skim its surface for insects.

Never had I seen house martins showing such forbearance and cooperation in feeding. After I had stood to count a sixth swoop and pass, the whole flock rose and veered off over the church tower, as if the last trench prospector had said: “Nothing here, guys. Move on.”

At a layby on the lane, a woman was unloading her car boot and I carried a tray of begonias for her through the church gate. She told me she was decorating her late father’s grave and made for a cluster of neat rectangular plots among close-trimmed grass. Over to the left, a house of God was open to heaven, the church roof long gone, graceful windowless arches partly framed with fragile remnants of wooden tracery. I stepped in through a doorway without a door, down an earth floor nave, then exited through a narrower doorway in the chancel.

A lichen-covered gravestone in the churchyard. Photograph: Sarah Niemann

A carefully mown path led through a wildflower meadow, where grasses grew tall among the graves of long-forgotten parishioners and the old stones now bloomed all year round with the yellows, greys, greens and whites of lichens.