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The Welsh have a word for the unattainable yearning you feel for a place that no longer exists, or to which you can never return.
*Hiraeth* is a homesickness you feel when home is years ago and far away, if it ever existed at all.
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*Hiraeth* is a homesickness you feel when home is years ago and far away, if it ever existed at all.
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Author Val Bethell describes this 'longing of the soul to come home to be safe':
"Hiraeth is in the mountains where the wind speaks in many tongues and the buzzards fly on silent wings. It's the call of my spiritual home, it's where ancient peoples made their home...
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"Hiraeth is in the mountains where the wind speaks in many tongues and the buzzards fly on silent wings. It's the call of my spiritual home, it's where ancient peoples made their home...
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We're high on a hill, where saints bathed sore feet in a healing spring and had a cure. ... the link with the long-forgotten past, the language of the soul, the call from the inner self.
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To enter some churchyards, you have to pass under a small shelter. Often they incorporate a stone platform and seats. They’re known as lychgates, and traditionally, bodies were kept here before burial.
Its name comes from the Old English word for a corpse - 'lic'.
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Its name comes from the Old English word for a corpse - 'lic'.
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Under a lychgate, a shrouded corpse and its pallbearers would be sheltered before burial. The 1549 Prayer Book ordered the priest to meet the corpse at the churchyard entrance; however, some lychgates existed before this date.
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Once the cleric had met the deceased and the burial attendants at the gate, they could proceed into the church.
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