Ballast Hills Burial Ground
Robert Gilchrist died at home on 11th July 1844. He was laid to rest at Ballast Hills burial ground a few days later. I visited the site on the 174th anniversary of his death, an act I had put off for several years as I searched for biographical traces of his life in local archives.
‘Sing me a song. Sing me a song’ I softly chanted as I wandered hesitatingly around Ballast Hills. Nothing appeared to materialise from the incantation. No spirit to guide me to his final resting place. The only grave markers were toppled-over water bottles, as disposable and discarded as the paupers underneath. My feet followed a broken flagstone pathway. Milky green lichens spread over the surface. Words fought for attention; golden grass seedheads filling inscriptions that have not yet been eroded. Some epitaphs stared at the sky, but most names were known only to the curious worm. This is a place that frustrates the historian. It does not expect or welcome visitors.
Situated to the east of the city centre, Ballast Hills burial ground served the needs of Newcastle as it rapidly urbanised. Seventeenth-century plague victims were interred here and the number of burials expanded following the influx of Scottish and overseas workers. It was formalised in 1785 when it was enclosed by a wall and set charges for burials. Many of the interred were poor or religious non-conformists, unable or unwilling to be put to rest in Anglican or Catholic grounds. The lack of space at alternative cemeteries meant that Ballast Hills began to become severely overcrowded. By the 1820s it was considered inadequate, contemporary reports highlighting the remains of the deceased were sometimes prematurely disturbed by new burials. By 1854 the graveyard had fallen out of use as alternative grounds were established. In 1930 the burial stones on the site were removed, many being laid down as flagging for paths and the entire site was turned into a public recreation area. Natural weathering means many of the inscriptions are becoming illegible. However the monumental inscriptions were recorded when the cemetery was converted into a park. Given Gilchrist’s reputed religious identification as a Glassite, a Scottish dissenting Christian sect, it is likely that the family forewent any graveside memorial, or at least used a modest one. Over time and with the majority of his remaining family locating to East London in the 1850s, Gilchrist’s gravesite fell from public knowledge, leaving only his house in Shieldfield Green standing as a monument to his memory, this eventually succumbing to a programme of urban renewal in 1959.
Ballast Hills invites reflection upon transience and impermanence. The removal and re-placing of headstones confirms there are no guarantees of an infinite posthumous locational marker. Despite my meanderings through the site and around its perimeter path no physical reminder to the memory of my poet ancestor can be found. Nothing. The lack of a grave marker signals a “representational elusiveness” (Kerler 2013: 85, cited in Micieli-Voutsinas, 2017, 94). It provokes traumatic feelings, not on the scale of national tragedy, but a visceral sense of dislocation and estrangement that seems to arrest my ability to feel, connect, and make meaning of the place. It’s the feeling of being cheated. But you get a sense that the paupers and dissenters buried here have been cheated too. The lack of memorial is testament to a lack of public value to their existence. The site is in the process of erasure, not threatened by the encroaching hand of urban regeneration, but through a combination of weathering and institutionalised forgetting. For the historian, constantly on the search for traces, Ballast Hills is a disappointment. The song collector Thomas Allan was disappointed too. Preparations for the biographical entries in his Tyneside Songs and Readings led to Allan commissioning a search for the final resting places of Tyneside’s poets and singers, including Gilchrist. Allan was acutely distressed by the lack of appropriate memorial to Tyneside’s bardic community and its members. The archive was fragmentary and incomplete, frustrating an “unreachable totality” desired by a collector (Rella 1987, 33), but graves provided a tangible endpoint to the biographic trail (Allan 1891, 43-44, 87, 561). Allan recognised, as had William Godwin, that finding the dead mattered.
There is a temptation to rue melancholically upon what remains hidden, Gilchrist’s hidden remains. But, as Pierre Nora contends, memory is “in permanent evolution, subject to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of the distortions to which it is subject, vulnerable in various ways to appropriation and manipulation, and capable of lying dormant for long periods only to be suddenly reawakened” (Nora 1996, 3). Other affordances spring to mind: the anticipation of placing Gilchrist back into the public realm by communicating his life, works and times, and educating others on the lost, humble poets of the past. Graves offer a form of compensation of what has been lost; a place to visit, to return to and commune. In the digital age, however, new potentialities arise to reconnect poet and place. Websites can host biographic and bibliographic information (http://bardoftyneside.info), social media can be employed to build interest and find receptive audiences. If memory is in permanent evolution then the digital afterlife becomes a powerful tool in the process of reawakening (Crawford 2017).
Extract from forthcoming book chapter, 'Lamenting the dead: the affective afterlife of poets' graves'.