page_title: Corpse road
section_title: A Midsummer Night's Dream
hierarchical_section_title: Corpse road / Characteristics of corpse roads / A Midsummer Night's Dream
context_page_description: Corpse roads provided a practical means for transporting corpses, often from remote communities, to cemeteries that had burial rights, such as parish churches and chapels of ease. In Britain, such routes can also be known by a number of other names, e.g.: bier road, burial road, coffin line, coffin road, corpse way, funeral road, lych way, lyke way, or procession way. etc. Such "church-ways" have developed a great deal of associated folklore regarding ghosts, spirits, wraiths, etc.
context_section_description: In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck says:
  Puck suggests a secret history of these routes, for unsurprisingly they attracted long extant folk lore, running not only through the physical countryside but also through the invisible geography, the 'mental terrain', of pre-industrial country-folk. Shakespeare's lines leave little doubt that the physical corpse roads came to be perceived as being spirit routes, taking on qualities which lingered in the folklore of his age and which he incorporated into his play knowing that it would be a familiar concept.
caption: The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, by Joseph Noel Paton
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