The monolith

Pictorial examples are needed here to indicate the various forms that rusticated memorials take. It is appropriate to start with the ‘monolith’-type memorial, where the ‘rustic’ or naturalistic element was most obviously pronounced.Footnote ¹³ This type of memorial may be found in many periods, and often featured in regions where the dominant stone types were relatively resistant to fine carving, for example granite, or where an abundance of rough stone was available, or where masonry skills were limited locally, or where its relatively low cost made it useful as a memorial. Monolith memorialisation is common, for example, in the Aran Islands off Galway, or in parts of the Scottish Highlands, or in the Charnwood parishes of Leicestershire. Conversely, despite the massive availability of local stone, it is rare in the Isle of Portland, because of the exceptionally high quality of limestone there and the skills of local quarrymen and carvers. In some cases the potential cheapness of such memorials can mark persons less pertaining to the locality, or of a lower class, standing instead of a more carefully prepared and expensive memorial. A 1970 example (Figure 1) from Inisheer, one of the Aran Islands off Galway, to Orla Knudson [sic], simply says in Gaelic: ‘Cuimnig ar “An Dane”’ (trans: ‘Put remembrance on The Dane’, or ‘Remember The Dane’). It commemorates an ‘outsider’, Orla the Dane (Orla Knudsen), a self-taught weaver living in a very small house who worked a loom built from driftwood.Footnote ¹⁴

Figure 1.

Inisheer, Aran Islands. Cuimnig ar ‘An Dane’, Orla Knudson (1905–70).

It is worth emphasising how enduring (both as material and fashion) these memorials are, for while they can be found throughout the British Isles in the medieval and early modern periods, or as a rare, inexpensive and less class-impressive form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they are also a type of memorial that came back into popularity from the later nineteenth century, and then (as we shall see) again in recent decades. Such monolith memorials mark some recent burials, including in village and urban cemeteries. They traverse periods and regions, but more recently are a fascinating revived form.

Monolith types may also act as a collective memorial, as in the Irish rusticated memorial (and increasing cairn), dated 1849, which commemorates victims of the Irish Famine of 1845–9 in Doolough in south-west County Mayo. Indeed, it is also the case that ruins may act as memorials, as one finds notably in Ireland and Scotland.Footnote ¹⁵ Or there was the First World War memorial referred to in the Parish Meeting Minutes of Newbold Verdon (Leicestershire) in 1924: ‘a rough granite stone large enough to inscribe the names of the fallen’.Footnote ¹⁶ A more individualised example is seen in Figure 2, for a one-month-old infant, Colin Logan, memorialised in 1888 in the churchyard of Church Langton, Leicestershire. Here it might appear that the ‘inchoate’, simple or unspoilt memorial denotes an undeveloped life, as if sculpturally prepared yet never completed.

Figure 2.

Church Langton churchyard, Leicestershire. Memorial to Colin Logan (February 1888–March 1888).

The nature of these monolith-type memorials varies considerably, exploiting the shapes of the natural stone, and its symbolic possibilities. Another moving example, seen in Figure 3, from Hallaton village cemetery in Leicestershire, combines monolith rustication with a deliberately shaped symbol of the cause of death. This occurred through the accidental fall of 29-year-old Dr Iain Challoner-Courtney and his American fiancée Dr Wendy Havelka from the Jungfrau in the Swiss Alps in July 1994, shortly after becoming engaged. The rustic memorial quite accurately represents the shape of the mountain. ‘They died together on the mountains they loved’, reads the monolith's inscription. An article in The Times describes their being roped together and falling 2,500 feet while descending after having reached the mountain's summit.Footnote ¹⁷ One notices here also a high level of educational attainment and a love of Nature associated with a rusticated memorial, a theme to which we shall return.

Figure 3.

Hallaton cemetery, Leicestershire. Memorial to Dr Iain J. Challoner-Courtney (aged twenty-nine), who died on the Jungfrau with his fiancée Dr Wendy A. Havelka on 27^th July 1994.

In some other such cases of monolith or rustication themes, aspects of the person or his/her occupation were apparently being referenced by this medium. A 1928 example from Northampton, perhaps of a blacksmith, is shown in Figure 4, for John Edmund and his wife Elizabeth, the rustication of which may also relate to hardiness of occupation, character or physique.

Figure 4.

Towcester Road Cemetery, Northampton. Memorial to John Edmund Matthews (died 1928, aged seventy-one), and his wife Elizabeth (died 1951, aged ninety-two).

Such forms of ‘rustic’, ‘naturalistic’, boulder or monolith memorial can be found in any decade from the later nineteenth century, but were especially prominent in the period 1870–1940. They may be a reflection of Toplady's popular hymn ‘Rock of Ages’, which was first published in 1775 but achieved particular regard during and from the terminal illness of Prince Albert in 1861. This is said to be the hymn that has the broadest and firmest grip upon the English-speaking world, and is a comfort in the hour of death. By 1892, the hymn appeared in every hymnbook of merit.Footnote ¹⁸ This also coincided with the popularity of rock gardens, constructed to provide alpine plants with surroundings that deliberately imitated nature.Footnote ¹⁹ In very recent decades there has been some resurgence of such monolith headstones. While they have never been a dominant memorial form, they are nevertheless frequently found, in town and countryside, with most cemeteries and countless churchyards containing examples. They are present in both Catholic and Protestant areas of cemeteries. They are by no means strongly concentrated in Celtic, upland, or granite or slate-quarrying regions, being common, for example, in Leicestershire and adjoining English midland counties, as well as in Cornwall, the Scottish Highlands or across much of Ireland.

These monolith memorials hint at outlooks or sympathies towards the natural world, conveying notions of the picturesque, notably those of the late Victorian period. Attitudes towards the deep past may also be implicit here. After all, access to Stonehenge and other ancient monuments was a controversial issue, notably from about 1902, and one also thinks of related emblems of Welsh and druidical identity and their changing cultural meanings. Monolith memorials eschew any idea of symmetry or ‘perfection’, they lack (or contrive to lack) any obvious machine-made quality, and thus in Ruskinian senses they are non-industrial and disposed towards an anti-urbanism, though no doubt industrial processes often contributed to their making. The contrast with carefully carved Gothic memorials, or with the industrially manufactured Art Deco memorials that became common from the mid-1920s – and which were specifically extolled as industrial products by the Art Deco Movement – is striking in this respect.

An aspect of irregularity or roughness, even of whimsy, is the hallmark of monolith or boulder forms of rustication. They lack the usual smoothness of Classical memorials. Indeed, some elements of the Gothic are evident in them, as in other forms of rustication: one thinks of the influence of antiquarian ruin imagery; Pugin's liking for natural-looking materials, such as rough stone walling or knapped flint; Ruskin's adapted ideas from Burke of the sublime and of uncorrupted Nature; or Ruskin's stress upon ‘sternness and rudeness’ and ‘imperfection’ as aspects of the Gothic.Footnote ²⁰ Ruskin commented upon ‘this wildness of thought, and roughness of work; this look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp’, as being among the features of Gothic. ‘Rather choose rough work than smooth work’, he wrote in his famous essay on the nature of Gothic.Footnote ²¹ Many rusticated memorials take such thinking to extremes. They may also refer us to the post-Darwinian interest in geology. Monoliths are perhaps less obviously Christian than many other types of memorial, though some (for example, Figure 3) feature a Christian cross or phraseology. One must also be aware of the connotations deriving from St Peter as the rock of the church, or Peter (or Petrus/petra) as meaning rock, and the complex associated theological discussion.Footnote ²²

While memorials have their architectural stylistic counterparts, that is much less true of such monoliths. Stark elements of raw landscape are seemingly repositioned to the sites of burial via these types of memorial. They embody strong traces of naturalism and Romanticism. As with other cases of rustication, they may sometimes refer to aspects of personal character: for one sometimes finds mentions of ‘A milestone of progress, work well done’; or of a JP and long-term Mayor of Loughborough; or of ‘Service and Courage’.Footnote ²³ Moreover, as can be seen from these illustrations – and a fuller array of images would convey this even more strongly – they are all sculpturally unique in shape, in varying stone type, size and other qualities. In other words, they are distinctive in almost every case, being individual and exceptional as such; they have great variety, and they depart from the regulated predictability of many forms of memorialisation, perhaps most notably during the twentieth century. It appears therefore that they denote memorialised people as unique individuals, rather than as persons apparently (via the frequent clichés of memorialisation) sharing a common religious spirit and emotionality with others from a local or wider community. They pay less regard than many other forms of memorialisation to social, theological or artistic conventions, and this may be one reason for their attraction. These are issues to which we will return.

Other forms of rusticated memorials

The monolith is a common ‘rustic’ form, yet only one among many other types. The anchor and rocks motif is widely found, as it had been in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century memorial cartouches and other designs. There it had frequently been associated with the theme of Hope and her anchor, often carved on cartouches with a female figure of Hope herself, most notably on slate headstones, which could take such detail well.Footnote ²⁴ There are many larger rusticated variants of this form, a common one being a cross set on a rough stony outcrop, with an anchor draped or hung by chains from the cross. This theme involving an anchor fitted well with a rustication memorial, as it was so compatible with rocky depictions, as well as with naval death memorialisation. A rusticated example of the latter from 1915 can be seen in Figure 5.

Figure 5.

Loughborough Cemetery, Leicestershire. Memorial to Herbert Goulden. Signalman in R. N. Killed at Saltholm, Denmark, 19^th August 1915, aged eighteen years. ‘God's will be done’.

Another form is the Calvary type of memorial, with a cross set into the top of a rock, which is frequently encountered in many burial grounds, such as Ashwell in Rutland. Another type, of dual rustication, incorporates an angel in rocky or arboreal-cross proximity. An example from a major Victorian cemetery in Leicester is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6.

Welford Road Cemetery, Leicester. Memorial to Enoch Henry Marvin (died 1940), and Edith and Betsy Marvin.

The treatment of crosses in arboreal fashion is frequent, sometimes adding other kinds of plant growth, and this is often conjoined with rock formations. A dual rusticated example is in Figure 7, from Montgomery churchyard.Footnote ²⁵ This style also featured in a catalogue from 1875, which stated that ‘the cardinal principle in designing a gravestone or monument which is to be erected in a Christian burying-place should be to distinctly recognise the Christian faith’.Footnote ²⁶ This recognition is seen repeatedly in the cross, the most meaningful of Christian signs, of course also present in popular hymns such as ‘When I survey the Wondrous Cross’.Footnote ²⁷

Figure 7.

Montgomery churchyard, Montgomeryshire. Memorial to Thomas Henry Lin (died 1892, aged forty-six), and his wife Caroline Lin.

Another form of rustication takes this further to the tree memorial, directly imitating a tree trunk.Footnote ²⁸ See, for example, Figure 8. In this case, as is often true of Welsh memorials,Footnote ²⁹ the address of the deceased is given, which was ‘The Pines’, so the design may be a reference to this. ‘The Pines’ also had an orchard.Footnote ³⁰ In other cases one can also find seeming residential linkage, as, for example, at Llanllwchaiarn churchyard (Montgomeryshire), where a memorial to Dr Dafydd Felix Richards (1924–68) is shaped like a rock, and Dr Richards lived at ‘Rock House’. This type of monument is often found, and indeed in other countries too, sometimes in association with further rusticated features, such as a rough-timbered chair.Footnote ³¹

Figure 8.

St David's Church, Newtown, Montgomeryshire. Memorial to Mary Morgan (died 1880).

A further variation of this type is seen in Figure 9, from Wolston (Warwickshire). The lopped tree shown here (as with a broken pillar) refers to a life cut prematurely short, often found on memorial iconography, in this case taking a large-scale and distinctive rustic form.Footnote ³² In some cases rustication contained lettering inscribed onto a rough stone surround and backing, not really amounting to a monolith. Or there could be similar treatment but onto an area surrounded by a rough wooden frame imitated in stone. Another aspect of rustication, which is quite common in the early twentieth century and interwar period, is what we term the ‘rock and scroll’ form, of which many variants exist, of quite different sizes.Footnote ³³ An example dating from 1918–20 is Figure 10, from Tugby churchyard in east Leicestershire. The scroll, featuring on other styles of memorial, reminds us of St Peter at the gates of heaven with his list of names of those to be admitted, and of the book of life mentioned in the New Testament. Here, people named in the book are to be saved on the Day of Judgement.Footnote ³⁴ The hymn, ‘When the Roll is Called up Yonder’ was written in 1893 and was being used in memorial services by the early twentieth century.Footnote ³⁵

Figure 9.

Wolston, Dyers Lane Cemetery, Warwickshire. Memorial to Kathleen Emily Sarah (Kittie) (1886–1919), wife of Charles Frederick Gibbs.

Figure 10.

Tugby, Leicestershire. Memorial to Thomas Curtis (died 1918, aged seventy-five), and Emma his wife (died 1920, aged seventy-seven).

A very striking form of stone memorial is the rough timber-framed and textured (almost ‘log-cabin’) type of which many variants exist, in many kinds of stone including marble.Footnote ³⁶ These are sometimes referred to as ‘log pediment’.Footnote ³⁷ An example of this is in Figure 11, from Cottesmore churchyard, Rutland: the memorial to Henry Hollis (1824–97), and to Hedley his son (1859–1901), ‘who served in the R. S. A. police, was at the relief of Mafeking, and died in hospital at Salisbury, South Africa, Feb 28, 1901’.

Figure 11.

Cottesmore churchyard, Rutland. Memorial to Henry Hollis (1824–97), and Hedley his son (1859–1901).

These types of rusticated tree rendition had some counterparts in other ecclesiastical forms, such as the elaborate font in a highly rusticated arboreal form at Peatling Parva church in Leicestershire. One might also refer to a long tradition of medieval and post-medieval bench-end carving, which in some less formal styles sometimes adapted elements of tree-like rustication. Such rusticated memorials can be related to many other woodcarvings, elements of rustication in church walls and construction, and the like.

Art Nouveau and related rusticated styles

These forms of rustication were often translated into Art Nouveau and some subsequent memorial styles, such that one might see such developments as separate from ‘rusticated’, though where there are dominant rusticated elements they warrant inclusion in our definition. As always with memorial styles, they can overlap interestingly. Kensal Green cemetery, for example, features the memorial to George Lenton (died 2004), where swirling water runs through and around rocks. Or it contains the slate outcrop, with broken lyre, which is the memorial to the poet Charles Mackay (1814–89). A very fine early 1920s memorial to Rachel and John Smith in Loughborough cemetery (Figure 12) comprises Art Nouveau forms coupled with much dual rustication.

Figure 12.

Loughborough Cemetery, Leicestershire. Memorial to Rachel Smith (died 1922) and John Smith.

An even more striking example of this blending of rustication into later styles, in this case into elements of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, is the superb, moving and nearly life-sized memorial, in the same Loughborough cemetery, to Dorothy Bennett (died 1938), shown in Figure 13.

Figure 13.

Loughborough Cemetery, Leicestershire. Memorial to Dorothy Bennett (died 1938).

The chronology of change

Our concern now must be to arrive at a much more precise understanding of the chronology of such rustication, and indeed how it fits with the more common forms of memorial styles: namely those broadly defined as Gothic and Art Deco. Indeed, for all the discussion of ‘the Gothic Revival’,Footnote ³⁸ the timing regionally and denominationally of that revival is less well specified, and the decline of the Gothic is an even less understood and studied phenomenon. Memorials are a perfect, though as yet non-utilised source, for these issues.

A total of 165 English and Welsh burial grounds, of all kinds, were studied for this examination of the three styles, and these are listed in our Appendix. Many burial grounds were analysed specifically for one type of memorial, notably the less numerous rusticated ones, while certain burial grounds were analysed for all three types, as is shown in the Appendix. This resulted in comparable distributions for 1,246 rusticated memorials, 1,067 Gothic memorials and 1,401 Art Deco memorials. These are combined by memorial type for the English East Midlands (parishes in Leicestershire, Rutland, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Cambridgeshire), Kensal Green cemetery, and Montgomeryshire (now part of Powys) in the subsequent analysis, for we can detect no significant differences in the respective stylistic chronologies of these English and Welsh churchyard, Nonconformist chapel, and cemetery memorial styles. Nor can we detect any significant dissimilarities in the adoption of rustication in churchyards and cemeteries, despite the undoubted other differences between the cemetery and the churchyard (affecting buildings, respective histories, legal frameworks, clerical control, ritual, or community focus). Each separate style appears in the postc. 1850 period to be synchronous for our regions and largely governed by national tastes.

Figure 14 shows the distribution of surviving memorial types over time, expressed as decadal percentages for that type of memorial. This shows clearly and comparatively the periodicity of each memorial type, while not showing how numerous each type was. Of course, rusticated memorials were relatively small in overall number compared with the dominant Gothic or Art Deco styles (hence the larger number of sites from which they have been sourced), and this is not shown in temporal percentage distributions of each type. This will become clear in two subsequent case studies of Loughborough cemetery and Newtown (Montgomeryshire) cemetery.

Figure 14.

Percentage distribution of types of memorials, by decade.

A number of points emerge. First, the duration of each style, or memorial fashion, was remarkably similar. Each style in a broad sense lasted about six decades, over different periods, and while rustication shows the greatest duration, lingering more into very recent years, all the styles are extraordinarily co-extensive in longevity to each other.Footnote ³⁹ Second, bearing in mind the relatively minor popularity of rustication as a style, it is remarkable the degree to which Art Deco from the 1920s (and its closest later derivatives) supplanted the Gothic. If the Gothic can be said to characterise a certain kind of Victorian religious sensibility and set of tastes – theological, naturalistic, ‘historical’ – the supplanting of these by the ‘modern’ style of Art Deco was dramatic and utterly decisive in the 1920s. An example of an Art Deco memorial (from Loughborough cemetery) can be seen in Figure 15.

Figure 15.

Art Deco memorial, Loughborough cemetery, to William Herrick (died 1938).

This surely has wider ramifications for systems of belief and artistic taste. There was literally, as this chart shows, a crossover period from one to the other, and that shift was a remarkable and sudden one, seemingly following the influence of the Paris Art Deco Exposition of 1925, and its wide ramifications for architecture and commodity culture. It took advantage of the decline in taste (or the distaste) for the Gothic, and the evident search for more relevant alternatives that was already apparent by the 1920s – for the Gothic memorial had been in marked decline since its heyday in the 1890–1910 decades. The vigorous growth of this Art Deco style after c. 1925 is apparent, to peaks in the mid-twentieth century, albeit with steady decline thereafter.Footnote ⁴⁰

Thirdly, and closely related to this, there is what appears to be a generational aspect of change here. What one sees are shifting styles manifesting period and cohort effects, in subjective, artistic and probably secularising trends. Each memorial type, with its respective peaks shown in Figure 14, was clearly and almost equally characterised by a generational span of about sixty years, or rather less if one looks at its main period of popularity. One might presume – though this is complicated by issues of cohort memorial decision-making and choiceFootnote ⁴¹ – that a generation develops fashions that are finally manifest in memorials, and that memorials thus represent something of a time-lagged expression of taste. A peak in Gothic in the 1900s decade, given prevailing life expectancies, thus represents the deaths of countless people who had reached maturity about thirty to forty years previously, at the height of Gothic and ecclesiological fashion adoption. Something similar may be manifest in the peaks of the other two memorial types – the rusticated and the Art Deco – though the sweeping nature of fashion change in the twentieth century may have become more rapid than was true in the nineteenth, given advances in post-1870 literacy, the array of media, means of communication and memorial taste transmission.

Finally, and by extension, one notices how the percentage peak of Art Deco exceeds the earlier two styles of memorials. This points to the rapidity and relative compression of this style, compared to the other two styles: it was literally squeezed into a shorter time frame, thus affecting this distributional graphical display in Figure 14. Within the terms of this memorial analysis, such change is not explicable by the rise of cremation, notably from the Cremation Act of 1902 and markedly from the 1950s,Footnote ⁴² for that rise simply (and dramatically) curtailed the numeric scope for burial memorialisation of a traditional kind, rather than truncating a style of burial memorialisation after the Second World War. Again, the pattern here is one of ascribed modernity, or more rapid change in styles, albeit coupled with and supplanted by the rather non-distinctive or commonplace nature of neoclassical/Lutyens styles of memorial that have, by and large, taken over from all three of these earlier forms in the modern cemetery or churchyard.

Two cemetery case studies

It is instructive to develop two regional case studies, comparing Welsh and English situations. Questions arise about ‘provincial’ or regional differences in the formation of tastes, about often presumed metropolitan diffusion of styles, about Welsh-English comparisons, and the effects of Anglican or Nonconformist dominant cultures. To address such issues, we therefore have chosen Loughborough cemetery in north Leicestershire, and Newtown cemetery (Montgomeryshire, mid-Wales, now part of Powys), for this purpose. The results emerge in Figures 16 and 17. We have shown the data in these Figures simply as numerical totals – rather than percentage distributions for each type as in Figure 14 – to convey a sense of relative numbers of each style. The numerical comparison is of course much influenced by the growing incidence (in affordability and in class terms) of stone memorialisation affecting burials in the twentieth century compared with the nineteenth century. A far higher and growing proportion of twentieth-century burials had lasting memorials than was true for the nineteenth century, or respectively for the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴³ This has some bearing upon the take-up of Art Deco memorialisation, given that this interwar style was extolled especially as machine-made, ‘modern’ and ‘industrial’, compared to the somewhat more extensive handwrought input to many Gothic memorials – thus making Art Deco memorials more price-accessible and facilitating the wider diffusion of memorialisation during the twentieth century. This has of course continued into the largely post-Art Deco era, even though some examples of deliberately ‘crude’ modern rustication supply exceptions.

Figure 16.

Loughborough Cemetery (Leicestershire): numbers of Gothic, rustication, and Art Deco memorials.

Figure 17.

Newtown Cemetery (Montgomeryshire): numbers of Gothic, rustication, and Art Deco memorials.

Loughborough Cemetery was laid out in 1857 and enlarged in 1892 to cover 12.5 acres.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is still open and used for burials. The cemetery is designed in picturesque style, surrounded by railings and a dense planting of shrubs and trees. The centrepiece is a Gothic-Revival style chapel building, now used as a commercial office space. Two lodges at the front, one in Gothic style, are currently occupied as residential dwellings.Footnote ⁴⁵ The cemetery also contains about eighty war graves including some of German and Italian servicemen.Footnote ⁴⁶

The municipal cemetery in Newtown, Montgomeryshire, opened in April 1884. It was constructed because the three nearby churchyards were inadequate for the population of this Welsh textile-industrialised town. The cemetery is located on a ten-acre plot, part of a former racecourse on the eastern edge of the town. This was quite a strongly Nonconformist region, given its Welsh culture. The first interment was of a small child whose burial was overseen by a Wesleyan Methodist minister, as the Anglican clergyman would not attend the service and burial in unconsecrated ground. The first monument was erected seven months after the cemetery's opening and was for John Hall (who died in 1882).

In other words, in relation to the chronology of Gothic memorialisation, this Welsh cemetery (like many others) is likely to truncate the early stages of Gothic documentation, which one normally expects to notice by the 1850s. Thus one should not attach too much importance to the steep rise of Gothic shown in Figure 17 for the 1880s. The churchyards that this cemetery replaced show Gothic as a memorial style emerging as early as the 1830s. This is despite the lively Welsh Nonconformity of the area, which might not be expected to conduce to early adoption of Gothic styles. Nevertheless, the peak of Gothic memorials here, in the 1890s, is in line with wider trends, as seen in Figures 14 and 16. There is no evidence of a ‘provincial’ or Welsh cultural delay behind the spread of Gothic in the English regions. Indeed, the local trends for all three types of memorial match very closely. They even correspond to the rustication trend for the London cemetery of Kensal Green (which peaked 1910–30), a metropolitan venue that one might presume to be forward in fashion. This allows one largely to discard ideas about ‘provincial’, rural, or Welsh memorial culture lag after the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁷ The synchronicity here of memorialisation change does not suggest much Celtic backwardness compared to the metropolis or central areas of England, though that remains to be more widely tested for other Celtic countries, and it is worth noting that their religious attendance rates were usually higher than in many English areas at this time.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, what is perhaps most distinctive in relation to Welsh culture is the precipitous decline in Gothic memorials shown here, somewhat earlier than the twentieth-century prolongation of Gothic style that one sees in the cemeteries or Anglican churchyards of the English midlands. By the 1920s, in this Welsh cemetery (as indeed in Montgomeryshire generally), Gothic was almost totally abandoned, which was less the case in many English rural and urban burial sites. This must be largely owing to the sceptically anti-Gothic sentiment that was latent in Welsh Nonconformist culture. Many in the Welsh demographic cohorts most strongly expounding such views would of course have been buried in the very early twentieth century, when the sharp decline of Gothic is obvious.