A miserable epitaph
Opposite the door to the church office, in the graveyard of St Mary Magdalene in Lillington, is the well worn tombstone of William Treen a local road scraper in the early 19th century. He was notoriously mean and lived on potato peelings and turnips from the local farmers. He died on 3rd February 1810 leaving to everyone’s surprise a sizeable fortune. The epitaph on his grave reads:
I poorly liv’d and poorly dy’d
Poorly buried and no one cried.
An unusually unsentimental verse for a tomb!
This churchyard also contains the graves of recipients of the Croix de Guerre and the Victoria Cross. Lillington is one of the many places, which claim to be the centre of England and within the parish grows the descendant of the Midland Oak.
