{"id":2827,"date":"2019-06-05T12:42:28","date_gmt":"2019-06-05T16:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alanskeoch.ca\/?p=2827"},"modified":"2019-06-05T13:05:10","modified_gmt":"2019-06-05T17:05:10","slug":"the-grave-startled-me-why-was-private-toghill-buried-here-in-1916","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alanskeoch.ca\/?p=2827","title":{"rendered":"The GRAVE STARTLED ME…WHY WAS private Toghill buried HERE IN 1916?"},"content":{"rendered":"
FORGOTTEN GRAVE<\/p>\n

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alan skeoch<\/div>\n
June 6, 2019<\/div>\n

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\u201cStrange grave\u2026no, it is a startling grave. What is this grave doing here?\u201d<\/div>\n

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Every time I visit London, I take a long walk in Coldfall Wood.   The forest has been here for at least 400 years dominated by trees so large<\/div>\n
and ancient that the sunshine cannot reach the forest floor.  Huge oak trees dominate the skyline with hundreds of Hornebeam trees  filling in <\/div>\n
the canopy.  As a  result the forest is delightfully open except where foresters have used chain saws to get a little light to the forest floor.<\/div>\n
Coldfall Wood is not my only reason to be here.   Besides the Wood is an ancient graveyard with old gravestones all askew because no one seems to care<\/div>\n
about this graveyard.  No grass  is cut.  No shrub is pruned.  No gravestone is straightened.  No strangling tangle of holly is removed.  With the<\/div>\n
result that this huge graveyard  near East Finchley, North London, seems forgotten.  Deliberately so.  The decision to let the graveyard<\/div>\n
become a tangled garden of wild plant and home for small wild creatures was deliberate.  <\/div>\n

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There are trails that wave randomly through the graveyard.  Foot paths taken by a few dog walkers and perhaps a derelict or two looking<\/div>\n
for a place to sleep.   A hiding place.  Some young Lodoners have built a tree fort high high in the branches of one immense bech tree\u2026room<\/div>\n
enough for a two storey structure of broken pallets.   The fort is as hidden as the graves.<\/div>\n

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On this visit, perhaps my tenth, I decided to walk along a very overgrown path.  Had to push my way through a dense Holly grove.  \u201cWhat is that?<\/div>\n
Looks recent, a grave not festooned with wild plants.\u201d \u2026 \u201cSomething familiar about the grave\u2026looks  like the thousands of similar gravestones<\/div>\n
in France.  An incised Maple Leaf.\u201d   Easy to read the stone… grave of Prvate W. T.<\/div>\n
Toghill, 13th battalion, Canadian Infantry, buried here on November 16, 1916.   He was 33 ;years old.<\/div>\n

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Someone knows that private Toghill is buried here.   The stone has been in place for 103 years and yet it has no ivy, no tree roots crossing<\/div>\n
the place where Private #132310 lies.  But why is he not buried with other Canadians in the special graves of soldiers killed in World War I.<\/div>\n

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And I wonder who keeps this  grave so clear.<\/div>\n

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alan skeoch<\/div>\n
June 2019<\/div>\n

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FORGOTTEN GRAVE alan skeoch June 6, 2019 \u201cStrange grave\u2026no, it is a startling grave. What is this grave doing here?\u201d Every time I visit London, I take a long walk in Coldfall Wood.   The forest has been here for at least 400 years dominated by trees so large and ancient that the sunshine cannot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanskeoch.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanskeoch.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanskeoch.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanskeoch.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanskeoch.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alanskeoch.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2827\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanskeoch.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanskeoch.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanskeoch.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}