England’s Top 10 Pyramid Tombs – the Strangest Mausoleums

Imagine you’re walking through an ordinary English churchyard, perhaps on a frosty winter day, plodding through the mist, stepping over clumps of white-glazed grass. Sheep huddle in the cold or nibble forlornly at the frozen ground; the graves are a typical selection of headstones, crosses and box tombs, moss and lichen covered; many inscriptions have worn away; some stones have sunk so far into the ground that only their curved or wavy tops are visible.

Then you trudge around the corner of the church building, look up, gasp, blink, look again. Your eyes are not tricking you – in front of you, there really does stand a 25-foot (7.6-metre) pyramid. It rises from the green land, against a background of bare trees; sheep bumble around it; moss patches its stones; its point tears at the mist, but – in this most English of scenes – it’s there: a pyramid, a miniaturisation of Ancient Egypt seemingly transported from the shores of the Nile and plonked down in a British churchyard.

And it’s not the only one. A number of such pyramid mausoleums are scattered across England – brooding in dark stone next to modest churches, crowning green hilltops or rising incongruously from the lush grass of aristocratic estates.

These pyramid tombs are magnets for bizarre legends – tales tell of glass strewn over their floors to repel the Devil, of occupants seated with bottles of wine to await the Resurrection. There are stories of the dead clutching playing cards in the hope of outwitting demons, of attempts to stop people dancing on ex-lover’s graves, of glimpses of tragic ghosts and of desperate schemes to keep family fortunes intact.

England’s pyramid tombs were the product of ‘Egyptomania’ – the passion for all things Ancient Egypt that gripped Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Freemasons became fascinated with the Pyramids’ ‘sacred geometry’ and the esoteric secrets supposedly hidden in their designs. Neo-Egyptian buildings sprouted on European streets; Egyptian themes invaded literature, opera and art; and Egyptian motifs appeared on products as diverse as furniture, jewellery and dinner services.

And, as so much of Ancient Egyptian culture revolved around death, it’s not surprising that pyramid tombs began popping up in English churchyards and beyond. Though England boasts quite a range of wonderful pointy-topped mausoleums, I’ve attempted to compile a list of the ten best. So let’s go for a quick tour and see what we can make of England’s strange pyramid tombs.

Number 1: Mad Jack Fuller’s Pyramid in Brightling Churchyard, Sussex

The pyramid tomb described above is England’s most famous. It was erected to house the body of one ‘Mad Jack Fuller’ – the squire of the hamlet of Brightling, Sussex. The pyramid stands, dark and moody, in the corner of Brightling’s St Thomas a Beckett Churchyard, dominating the gravestones and even seeming to challenge the primacy of the church itself.

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