Paper short abstract:

Death rituals start before the funeral. This paper focuses on the folklore traditions of attending the corpse immediately after death, and transporting it for burial. I discuss the certainty ascribed to these rituals, the evidence for them, and how they manifest themselves in the present landscape.

Paper long abstract:

The physical transportation of a corpse from the place of death to its place of interment is not normally considered part of the formal rituals of valediction or funerary formalities in Christian societies, or accorded the same status thereof. There are, however, various aspects of folklore, formalism and tradition associated with this “pre-funerary” phase of the corpse’s journey. In early modern Britain, “corpse roads” linking rural settlements to burial churches, along which funerary parties travelled either by cart or (more usually) on foot were documented by the British Ordnance Survey as late as the nineteenth century. Some such routes, especially in rural northern and southwestern areas of England, became very well-known as corpse roads to local communities. Further, folk literary traditions such as the “Lyke Wake Dirge” documented by John Aubrey (1626-1697) and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) provide folk descriptions of both the metaphorical and the physical journeys the corpse must take to its final rest (the “Whinny-Moor” of the title appears in this ballad). This paper reviews the physical, archival, cartographic and literary evidence for “corpse roads” and associated folklore, and considers the following questions: given the physical difficulties which often attended the process, what certainty did rituals associated with the transportation of a corpse provide to mourners and communities? Given the relative scarcity of evidence, how can we compare the study of pre-funerary rituals and processes with more formal, funereal, settings? And most importantly, how did, and do, these rituals appear as heritage in the contemporary landscape?