THE LIGHT IS RISING – new film shows Sharpham Meadow through the seasons

Many Totnesians have loved ones buried at Sharpham Meadow, overlooking the River Dart. Sophie Pierce’s son Felix was laid to rest there in 2017.  Here she reflects on the years since…and why she wanted to document time at his resting place.

Sharpham Meadow is an impossibly beautiful place.  A simple field overlooking the Dart estuary, it faces the sea and the daily sunrise, its earth holding the bodies of those who have died.  In the autumn and winter its bare bones speak of pain and loss, while in the spring and summer its burgeoning flowers and grasses bring hope as the graves hum with insects. It is a place where somehow the core mysteries of life – time and our mortality – are symbolised, or even embodied.

When my son Felix died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2017, aged just 20, I was forced into confronting these difficult subjects.  I now realise how fortunate we were to be able to bury him at Sharpham Meadow. In subsequent years, and still today, being able to return here on a regular basis helps my grieving, by giving me a sense of the greater cycle of life and death, of which we are all a part.

Felix’s death changed me permanently.  It also changed my relationship with the landscapes around my home: the uplands of Dartmoor, the soft hills of the South Hams and the rugged Devon coast.  As the years passed, I realised that these places were somewhere I could reconnect with him, and I ended up writing a memoir about this process of love, loss, and landscape. I realised that our emotions are not just bound up with people, but with places too; we are part of the land and the earth.  Sharpham Meadow plays a crucial role in the story, as the place to which I constantly return.  The title of the book, The Green Hill, is a reference to that.

As well as writing, I felt I also wanted to portray the burial ground individually, in words and pictures. I got together with my photographer friend Kate Mount, who lives in Dartington, and who, coincidentally, already had an interest in depicting graveyards; she had already done such a project in Ireland. We decided to visit Sharpham Meadow once a month, at dawn, for a year; Kate would take pictures and I would write some words. This resulted in the website: https://thegreenhill.uk/

This was a few years ago. Now, in 2026, the paperback of The Green Hill is coming out, and I decided to turn Kate’s stills into a film, as a way of allowing more people to see the timeless beauty of the burial ground. It is is a simple concept: showing the place at sunrise as the year passes, from winter into spring, summer and then the autumn, a continual cycle, life in constant flux. The daily rising of the sun will continue long after we are all gone.

Sophie will be showing her film: The Light is Rising: a year at Sharpham Meadow, and talking about The Green Hill, in an event in association with the Eastgate Bookshop on Thursday 23rd March at Totnes Methodist Church at 7pm.  More information here: https://sophiepierce.co.uk/events/