They say that the most dangerous place in the world is in bed, since most of us die there. But what happens next to our carbon footprints?

Certainly many of us leave our mortal remains lying about in graves for far longer than we ever spent in bed – or in “strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage” for that matter, to paraphrase Shakespeare in As You Like It.

My mind turned to such macabre musings after coming across a new book by local historian and author Marilyn Yurdan: Oxfordshire Graves and Gravestones (The History Press, £12.99), which features dozens of photographs of final resting places from the archives of this newspaper.

Talk about ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the paradox here is that graves contain such an astonishing record of life.

The county has more than its fair share of famous people buried under its turf: Winston Churchill at Bladon; Herbert Asquith and George Orwell – an unlikely duo – at Sutton Courtenay; William Morris (Pre-Raphaelite) at Kelmscott; William Morris (motor man) at Nuffield; Kenneth Grahame at Holywell; Dorothy L. Sayers at Wolvercote, where J.R.R. Tolkien is also buried; Jerome K. Jerome at Ewelme; John Buchan, whose ashes are at Elsfield; and C.S. Lewis at Headington, to name but a few from the 19th and 20th centuries.

But insights into the lives of less famous people over the years may also be unearthed here. For instance, old John Young, born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, died in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, which saw William of Orange sail from Holland and ascend the British throne.

Or there is the tale of the beautiful Sarah Fletcher who died of “excessive sensibility” in 1799 and is buried in Dorchester.

In fact, she hanged herself after hearing that her husband had attempted to marry an heiress.

The coroner returned the charitable verdict of lunacy, but that did not, apparently, stop her ghost visiting her former home so often that a 19th-century resident fell in love with her! The British way of death, it seems, differed for centuries from that on the continent. Here, from the Middle Ages until the opening of municipal cemeteries, in response to the 19th-century population explosion, bodies were interred in churchyards at the very heart of parishes; there, they were taken away to out-of-town burial grounds, walled off and out of sight.

Grand and famous people were buried in churches, the rest of us in graves outside the building – and so many of us, too, one on top of the other, that the level of the ground is now much higher in most old churchyards than that around it.

Coffins were (and are), very often carried into burial grounds through lychgates, and then set down on benches under the eaves to await the arrival of the priest. Lych is the Old English word for corpse.

Graves of ordinary people were not usually marked with the names and details of their occupants until the 17th century, though they were sometimes adorned with wooden markers.

But these markers fell from favour in Victorian times because they rotted and made churchyards look untidy.

Cholera outbreaks in Oxford in 1832, 1849, and 1854 brought home to those left alive in the city just how overcrowded the old parish churchyards were, and indeed what a health hazard they had become.

The Rev W.R. Browell, Fellow of Pembroke College, wrote in 1832 of the appalling state of St Aldate’s churchyard, adjoining his college.

He said that even pathways had been dug up from time to time to provide more space, and the result was that they sometimes caved in under the weight of passers-by when a coffin lid below gave way.

But what happens to our consciousness? Too deep for me, that. So I think I’ll go to bed.