DISCOVER Mersea Island
TAKE ADETOUR while exploring the intriguing seven-square-mile island of Mersea –off the coast of Essex, a few miles south of Colchester and accessed via a causeway called The Strood – and you might stumble across the most macabre sight.
In the churchyard at East Mersea there’s a caged grave – as unsettling to contemplate whether it’s to keep something out or to keep something in. Nobody’s quite sure which it is. What we do know is it belongs to poor Sarah Wrench, who died aged 15 years and five months in 1848. According to one account she was a witch, from whose potential resurrection the parish needed protecting (there’d been four accused witches on Mersea in the 17th century, so perhaps they had reason to be particularly cautious). Consumption is recorded as the cause of death, though some say she actually died in a childbirth too shameful to acknowledge, and she was buried outside the bounds of consecrated ground. But the most likely explanation is that it was built to deter bodysnatchers supplying black market corpses to the anatomist trade, and the cage was a spade-proof so-called ‘mortsafe’.
Bodysnatchers, or ‘resurrectionists’ as they were known, had been driven out of the cities by increasing graveyard security, and were raiding fresh graves in smaller communities, often transporting their quarry in suspiciously heavy, sometimes oozing boxes marked ‘Glass – handle with care’ or ‘Produce’. Who paid for Sarah’s cage, or
