Elegy for the country churchyard

Just read an article from Over the Water which announced that Engish authorities have decreed, due to the severe shortage of land and the increasing propensity of people to die, that cemeteries will be able to do something called "deepening" which will involve takiing existing plots and burying the original remains deeper so as to allow up to six caskets to be stacked. Older gravestones would apparently be the first to go, although surviving family could defer the disinterment. And so, all of us who go to the tiny distant villages where our ancestors worked and wed and worried and worshipped, will no more be able to wander the faint scribed, tilted stones of a time distant with the hope of better understanding from whence we came. No more will it make sense to take rubbings from gravestones long forgotten. And no more will poets be moved, as was Thomas Gray, to pen a long poem, rich with images of the past and passing, to bring us to reflection on mortality and time and to imagine those distant moments from the past when a gravestone was all the immortality one might achieve.

"Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep."

As for me, cremation seems a better choice for the earth, and tokens other than gravestones a better remembrance. Still, I think this is a tragedy. That we lose something when the graveyard loses its hallowed state.