Among the most striking examples of elevated graveyards which have come under my notice are those at Telscombe and Rottingdean in Sussex; Brighstone or Brixton, in the Isle of Wight; and Milton Lilbourne, in Wiltshire. Various writers have noticed a like feature in Breton and Basque churchyards. After perusing these records afresh, two passages from the writings of observant travellers come to mind. The first is from Peter Kalm, the Swede, who visited England in 1748. He noticed that the floor of the English church often goes deeper down than the surface of the churchyard soil. From this, he inferred either that the church had sunk, or that the earth of the churchyard had been raised, owing to burials; unless, indeed, soil had been brought to the spot. William Cobbett’s _Rural Rides_ affords a strong corroboration of the facts. Cobbett’s keen eye missed little, and his quick intuition sometimes--by no means always--suggested the correct explanation of features which more careless tourists would have overlooked altogether. The passage refers to the village of Rogate, near Petersfield in Hampshire, and his remarks are so apt that a full quotation may be pardoned. The letter is dated 12 November, 1825. “When we came to the village of Rogate, I saw a little group of persons standing before a blacksmith’s shop. The churchyard was on the other side of the road, surrounded by a low wall. The earth of the churchyard was about four feet and a half higher than the common level of the ground round about it; and you may see, by the nearness of the church windows to the ground, that this bed of earth has been made by the innumerable burials that have taken place in it. The group, consisting of the blacksmith, the wheelwright, perhaps, and three or four others, appeared to me to be in a deliberative mood. So I said, looking significantly at the churchyard, ‘It has taken a pretty many thousands of your forefathers to raise that ground up so high.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said one of them[241].” Cobbett then proceeds with a little socratic questioning of the villagers, in order to point a political moral, but with this we are not concerned. As he trots off on his nag, however, he begins to estimate how many hundreds of years a church has stood on the spot, and here our musings may be in accord with his once more.