Toadstools in a Shrewsbury graveyard

Shrewsbury We walked to the grave of Mary Webb and found the fungi growing around her neighbours’ headstones

The toadstools opened from the graveyard like fleshy satellite dishes – ears of the necropolis listening to the living. We were in Shrewsbury cemetery to pay our respects at the turning year to those we knew there. The newer part had serried ranks of black or white marble headstones between drives, their funerary decorations modest symbols of grief and remembrance in a utilitarian order to keep the public face of death tidy.

The older part of the cemetery belonged to a much more Gothic sensibility: the graves mostly Victorian to the 1930s, their mossy stones listing on undulating ground and scattered randomly under trees, separated by meadow grasses.

Related: How Mary Webb and DH Lawrence helped build Cold Comfort Farm