If you think that’s bad, you should have seen him during the height of the BSE crisis. As you can imagine, this had a devastating effect on Gatshire, despite the fact that, as with the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak, not one case was ever noted in the county. I wouldn’t say things ever got to the stage where people became suicidal –at least, I hope not; it’s common knowledge farmers are more susceptible than most on that front– but times were certainly tough.

So far as I’m aware, there has been only one suicide in our village in the last two hundred years. It was in the nineteenth century, and again we are talking about an agricultural catastrophe. Seven lean years were followed by the worst drought in living memory, a spell of dry weather extraordinary even by the standards of our recent summers, during which, according to the diary kept by the Reverend Hugh Worthing, just three days’ rain fell between the 25th of June and the 2nd of October.

This journal is also one of two principal sources for details of the suicide. The entry for the 18th of September tells of ‘a tragic and distressing event.’ The body of one Mr Edward Walsh, a farmer, ‘was discovered this morning by Master Benjamin Haycock, a labourer of this parish, lying face down in the river.’ Our author speculates at length on the likely causes of death, but he does not seem to countenance the possibility that it was due to anything other than an accident or natural causes; he gives several suggestions, the most plausible of which, he thinks, is a heart seizure. In Gatshire then suicides were not given a Christian burial, but were buried outside the churchyard with a perfunctory ceremony in which the Church took no part. A few days later, however, the vicar describes Mr Walsh’s funeral, at which he himself officiated.

You can visit the grave at St Luke’s. Like many of the others there, the gravestone is covered in moss and lichen, and the name is hard to read, but you should find it if you look near the northern wall (that’s the one on the opposite side of the church from the footpath), about fifteen to twenty feet away from where it meets the western one.