When London’s railway was expanding through St. Pancras Church’s graveyard in the 1860s, Thomas Hardy had to move the bodies to another cemetery. The future novelist placed the headstones around an ash tree, they got entangled in its roots, and over time, a haunting image of life and death becoming one was formed in the churchyard. Source Source 2 Source 3
“’The Levelled Churchyard’, an early poem by Thomas Hardy, is thought to have been inspired by his abhorrence for the task he was set while working as an apprentice architect in the King’s Cross area of London in the mid-19th century.”