From a churchyard bench, Lena Stahl surveys a million years of north Norfolk life.

I treat the graveyard like my extended living room. 

I don’t know if that is morbid or disrespectful or really not that big of a deal. The main reason is a very practical one: It features the nearest bench for miles around. And trust me, I’ve really looked. I used to be able to walk for miles with an almost manic energy and pep in my step. Now I get to this point and then I have to sit down for a minute, or forty-five. 

When you come out of the farm, you turn left and go all the way down the lane. There is a slight incline past the badger sett and the horses and then you emerge out of the thicket of hawthorn and dog rose, where the road takes a right turn. You could turn left towards the Christmas tree farm and further on to the canal but today, like so many days, I just don’t have it in me. So, I turn right, walk pretty much the same amount of lane again, having now covered two sides of the enormous field with the dignified, solitary oak in the middle (currently wheat, sometimes corn or sugar beet, a bit further down potatoes) until I get to the little church. 

Norfolk has approximately 650 churches, making it the area with the highest concentration of churches in the world. There are really too many to count. Stand on any given spot and spin around and the flat landscape around you will reveal at least two or three, if not six churches in your immediate eyeline. Some are connected to villages, some stand completely solitary. Most likely there is a rectangular church tower, and the whole thing it is covered in flint — beautiful, shiny, knapped flint, in all different shapes and shades. This church has no tower at all, but it is definitely covered in flint. A lot of things are covered in flint in Norfolk. They even covered the newly built Tesco in Sheringham in flint so that it would fit in better. There is flint everywhere, right here in the ground, the disturbed earth in the field uncovers it. I wonder if the people in their graves are now surrounded by flint, if it is wedged in between their bones — intertwining minerals. 

I enter the churchyard through a gap in the hedge and wave my hand at Dick and Leas’ graves, right by the entrance. It feels right, I see them every day. I walk around the church past the water tank and the urn graves and there it is: my bench. It very much feels like my bench; I spend so much time here. Although, it is actually dedicated to someone who I believe is related to our landlord, the farmer who rents out the cottages on the farm. There is a little golden plaque. 

I sit and hang out with Robert and Pamilay, the two graves directly opposite. A married couple who died in 1881 and 1896 respectively, each with their own gravestone.

I feel like I am in my living room and Pamilay and Robert are my mentally-much-better-adjusted housemates. They have really seen me through it all: 

Monday: remembering in the church graveyard.  

Tuesday: crying in the church graveyard. 

Wednesday: giggling in the church graveyard. 

Thursday: completely losing it in the church graveyard.

Friday: living it up in the church graveyard (I listen to early 2000s club hits on my headphones).

I feel awkward and slightly guilty when another living person comes by.  Like I shouldn’t be here, just hanging out, while others are here to grieve loved ones, pay their respects to relatives or old friends. They come with a purpose; I just come to exist. I feel uncomfortable, even though all the newer graves are on the other side of the church. The people on the side with my bench mostly died over a hundred years ago, if not more. Their gravestones are half submerged and covered in moss. No one really comes for them anymore. 

But visitors rarely happen anyway — ninety-nine percent of the time it’s just me. And Pamilay and Robert. And the curious robins, the wagtails and the rooks that nest under the exposed church bell, at the side of what used to be the church tower. 

I wonder about their lives. The rooks’ lives, yes, but also Robert’s and Pamilay’s. Did they attend this church? Back when everyone still did. I have never seen a service being held here, although sometimes I hear the bells ringing out when I wake up late on a Sunday morning. Did they live in the village nearby or more remotely on a farm, like me? She went on to live a few more years without him. I recently learned that robins only live about a year, one go around all the seasons, then pass away. There were 15 generations of robins in the churchyard between Pam (am I allowed to call her Pam?) and Robert’s deaths. Did she see them when she visited his grave? Was there a bench here then and did she ever sit on it? So many generations of robins since then. Hopping from gravestone to gravestone and hiding in the thick blackthorn hedge marking the boarder of the churchyard.

In the summer, I spend whole evenings watching golden-orange sunsets, gravestones glowing in the light. Norfolk sunsets are the best I have ever seen, the sky being so wide and open and available. Generous colours on generous canvas. 

There are robins all year round. Bumblebees arrive in late spring. Combine harvesters circle in late summer. Over the next few days, harvested fields appear closer and closer to the church. It’s like they are drawing in on us, one maize-buzzcut at a time. After months of walking in a maize maze, between two-metre-high corn stems, I am struck by how the experience of the landscape is transformed by this newly regained visibility, this reintroduction of distance. A farmworker sleeps in his harvester in a lay-by down the lane. No point driving home when you only stop working at midnight and start back up again at dawn. I learn that it’s a gamble every year, deciding on the right time to harvest, factoring in rain, temperatures, ripeness. The harvest carries on, day and night. When I wake up in the dark of the early hours, I see the machine headlights through my blinds, crawling slowly across the landscape.

In October there is a sudden explosion of ladybirds. Red with black dots, black with red dots and then a sort of washed-out in-between colour, like when you mix together ketchup and mayonnaise. They are completely covering my graveyard bench, making it almost impossible to sit. I squeeze in anyway and let them crawl on my jeans, land in my hair. I read that they swarm in late October to find a place to stay warm and dry over the winter. I hope they find the slightly ajar, stained-glass church window. Are they being strategic about finding a wintering place or are they just stabbing in the dark, buzzing around until they stumble upon an open door or window? I imagine the church is a great place to spend the long winter: all that space, all that ceremonial silence. 

The ladybirds seem busy this autumn. So are the farmworkers and combine harvesters. I’ve never been less busy. I watch a YouTube video-essay, a recap of a realty TV show that I have never seen. I don’t know why I am doing this. I feel like my legs, from the knees downward, are set in cement. 

Around Halloween it all feels very on-brand, hanging out with the ghosts. I don’t feel fully alive myself. The season brings back memories of school-time dares: spending midnights at the cemetery, the ghosting hour. As the days grow shorter, I have to get my graveyard fix on my work-from-home lunch break. I get back to my desk late.

The mid-November storm lasts for days. I feel the resistance as I walk between the fields. The land is so flat that nothing will take away the momentum of the wind. It feels like a professional closer finishing up a financial deal, coming in last minute and getting those final leaves off the cherry tree in the churchyard corner. Closing the deal on winter once and for all. 

Frost cover, frozen ground. My butt feels cold when I sit down on the bench now. I cover my hands in my jacket sleeves and when I turn to touch the church wall flint, it is icy. The buzz-cut fields covered in left over sugar beet invite large crowds of seagulls and — most excitingly — wild geese. Having travelled from the far north for hundreds of miles, they settle down in the empty brown fields over the winter. I feel silly needing to sit down to rest after my short walk, whilst they cross several countries before landing. I hear their calls flying over and watch them from my bench or the margins of the field, crouching behind a leftover row of frozen corn stems. Our landlord’s brother drives down the track on a four-wheeler and startles them. They take five dramatic and loud turns in the air before settling back down in the same spot. I feel the urge to stick my arms elbow-deep into the soil and breathe in the earth, to curve my body and lie into the lay of the land. 

Sometimes I circle around the churchyard to find the oldest graves. When spring arrives, there are wildflowers everywhere, flowering on and around the gravestones. I search on a website dedicated to Norfolk’s folklore and on the map, I find an entry where my church stands. It tells me that there are legends of a giant sinkhole with the name ‘Seagar-ma-hole’, which had swallowed a previous church in the same spot entirely. It appeared again in the 1700s, swallowing a cart and several oxen. Then there are verifiable reports of another hole in the 1990s. The locals believed there to be a portal to the fairy world. I am elated. Have I been sitting on a portal to the magical realm this whole time? 

In a far-flung corner I find someone who died in 1718. Some of the engravings are hard to read, some of the stones are half buried themselves. 1718 was a long time ago, but people have lived in north Norfolk for nearly a million years. They found their footprints in the sand, a couple of miles north from my church on the beach in Happisburgh. The oldest human footprints found outside of Africa. As quickly as they appeared they disappeared again, washed away by the current. Now the land is slowly eroding, falling into the sea. Gravestones falling into the ground, the sinkhole, everything submerges. On borrowed time. Maps predict how rising sea levels will completely cover north Norfolk in the not-too-distant future. A new sea floor covered in churches, covered in flint. Maybe it is foolish, spending so much time in the graveyard while I am still alive. While I am not yet submerged. Whilst I still can, I have to try and cover more ground. 

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Lena Stahl is an actor and writer originally from Germany and currently based in north Norfolk. You can follow her on Instagram here.