ST PANCRAS CHURCHYARD has an interesting history. It was here that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley met his future wife, Mary Wollstonecraft (author of Frankenstein), when she was placing flowers on her mother’s grave.
But the most noticeable oddity is the group of gravestones clustered around the remains of a tree. These were moved here by the novelist Thomas Hardy in the 1860s, when he was in charge of excavations for the construction of St Pancras Station, Midland Railway’s London terminus. The ash tree, known locally as the Hardy Tree, fell down in 2022.
(Photo courtesy of John Salmon)
