Dorset memory 2 - A Norman church

The old Norman church  nestled into a small valley surrounded by a few odd yew & stark clad copper beech trees, appeared among the worn gravestones in a quiet village. It's stone exuding a dark war torn history in its dark ochre colored walls. The churchyard silent, as the fog descended from a leaden sky around the engraved headstones, swirling damply it lingered lazily around the lost souls that lay beyond the cold earth. What wounds, what tales of sadness do they endow? The children can no more sing, their love abideth no more & is lost in their dying innocence.

The sloping roof of the church seems ghostlike as the grey damp fog swirls low around the gothic  looking windows. The crows, black like tar, cry out from the nearby trees as they perch mockingly in the foggy dew, clinging to bare branches. The church door thickly studded, creaked open swinging on its age old hinges. The flagstoned floor, smooth with time honored history, seemed to gleam with a dusty empathy. In the towering timbers of the roof & floating around the walls, an organ played with mellow mournful notes, drifting around the vast musty space invading the silence. The monuments on the inside walls beyond the hard wooden pews, spoke of all things past & gone, memorials of lives living in a long ago era.  People who lived life's ambition, now in their darkest caverns, lie motionless, bones of idleness, dearly departed. The tall timbers in the roof telling of past centuries, witnesses to the history of time. The hard wooden pews in rows, sit silent & empty, while outside the fog laden air, chilling the bones of the dead buried beneath the worn headstones.

The morning sun quietly plunders the thinning fog & starts to shake free the mist from its clinging hold. Slowly the sun's rays penetrate the hanging shroud to dispel its hold & awaken the gloomy shades of night.

The valley with its gently sloping hills & hamlets, sprinkled here & yonder, starts to shed its wintry slumber as the sun creeps into the fields & over the small woodlands .Villages embrace the golden light as it enhances the morning, the animals move about with increased expectancy as they consume the summer's harvest. There is a fresh crisp vigor to the country air, with its abundance of carefree presence. A river runs clear, down from the hills where it gathers in force trickling out of the rocky crevices, it gurgled its ways down through the earth brown fields & rippled damp channels in a meadow. It dawdled past the hay filled barns & slowed on the flatness beyond a farmyard. Travelling under a bridge where it gently slapped the sides as it silently flowed toward the sea. The murmuring was heard as it sidled through an old orchard where the last of the pickings lay beneath the lichen strewn branches. The river had swelled & with its gathered force, reached the sea & emptied itself continually into the ocean depths, disappearing in a salty wilderness. 
The Norman church gave up its gloom  as the sun filtered through its windows, &  the crows abandoned the branches of the bare trees as the village people approached the old studded door that creaked on its hinges.