What will survive of us…

One photographer’s odyssey of every rural church in England is yielding monumentally weird results

Alife-size statue of a horse shot and stricken, with the brave Colonel Edward Cheney still in the saddle, commemorates this hero of Waterloo. Four other horses were shot from beneath him, but he carried on, surviving the battle and not dying till 1848. The monument was made for the family home and transferred to the village church of St Luke, Gaddesby, only in 1917.

Horses look odd in English churches, though the Florentines got Uccello to paint a great big memorial of the mercenary Sir John Hawkwood on horseback in 1436. Another full-size horsey memorial (by Alfred Munnings at Mells, Somerset) and a medieval knight in armour on a prancing warhorse at Hampstead Norreys, Berkshire, also figure in CB Newham’s astonishing and beautifully photographed Country Church Monuments.

In England and Wales many of the most glorious great monuments – and the most peculiar – are in rural areas. At West Dean, Wiltshire, the baroque theatricality of Robert Pierrepont helped by an obliging angel to rise again on the last day, his severed leg healed (but with a narrow break in the marble to show where it was sawn through), is accentuated by double doors that open to reveal the scene.

The 365 examples chosen for fullpage illustration and commentary here are the clotted cream of the milk of human mortality. Newham has visited 9,000 country churches in the past few years for his stupendous project of photographing every rural church in England. His travels with a camera make Cobbett’s Rural Rides seem like a bankholiday jaunt.

Weird and wonderful sum up the monuments here. The weirdness is not quite of the grand guignol flavour offered, say, by the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo. But at Stow Bardolph, Norfolk, stands a waxwork from 1744 of the chubby Sarah Hare, bursting with life and peering from her vertical mahogany case as though she were looking in at a window to join the company.

Even more unsettling for some will be the two effigies of the completely shrouded corpses of the 15th-century Thomas and Agnes Beresford at Fenny Bentley, Derbyshire, wrapped up like something from a tin of Quality Street – something crunchy. An allied convention of cadaver monuments showed that the well-to-do realised that memorials were not exactly to them, since they’d be dead. A marvellous double-decker for the Duchess of Suffolk (Chaucer’s granddaughter, died 1475) at Ewelme in Oxfordshire shows her lying as in life, hands joined, but at a lower level beneath the slab, behind gothic tracery, is sculpted her skeletal corpse with shrunken breasts. That cadaver monument was not easy to photograph, and Newham’s pictures are a revelation when taken from above. Unlike sideways floor-level views that we are used to, they show characters, with solid English faces, and clothes tailored in stone, alone with sword and shield or side by side, sometimes holding hands.

At Spilsby, Lincolnshire, in place of caryatids, a ducally crowned Saracen and a wild man support the arches of a tomb from the 1580s. It intended to be classical but, like an engraved book frontispiece of the period, couldn’t restrain its imagination. In the 1660s a wild man and wild woman flanked the innovation in the latest taste of coloured scagliola, resembling marble, at Hinton St George, Somerset – a monument that would do a cathedral proud.

Some monuments are curious

Unsettling effigies of a couple of 15th-century corpses are wrapped up like Quality Street

because of the circumstances of the death. A bas relief of a nursing mother at Kirby Wiske, North Yorkshire, commemorates the unfortunate Fanny Samuelson, who insisted on using petroleum-based shampoo. It exploded. At Barnwell, Northamptonshire, a tall obelisk commemorates Henry Montagu, who drowned in 1625, aged three, in a pond; “Pour on me the joys of thy salvation,” says the inscription.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Sir Thomas Parkyns, at his seat, Bunny in Nottinghamshire, sculpted by his own command as a Cornish hugwrestler; Death is depicted next to him, laying him flat. At Arundel, West Sussex, the 5th Countess (died 1339) sports a hairdo like a giant horned honeycomb. At Elmswell, Suffolk, there is a rhinoceros.

You might find your work cut out to visit one of these 365 monuments every day for a year, but at one a week you’d have seven years of pleasure and surprises.