Robert Lever Bailey grave (1816 to 31^st March 1864)

Folk easily condemn the idea of a traditional god, think nothing cares for us and religions are based on fairly tales. But what about a creator rather than a deity? There’s evidence of creation is all around us. Something can't magic from nothing so where did it come from? The agreed idea from scientists is that the universe was created about 13.8 billion years ago. It was inside a bubble that was thousands of times smaller than a pinhead. One day there was a colossal explosion and The Universe was born in a tiny fraction of a second. Where did the collection of components that created a explosion come from? How/why did they mix? Why did it happen 13.8 billion years ago and not 30 billion years ago? What created them when zero x zero = zero?

I’m afraid my brain melts into spaghetti just thinking about it but I lie in bed trying to work it out. I doubt we’ll ever come close to knowing the answers. A druid called Robert Lever Bailey thought he knew and he's buried in Bolton I went to search for him. In my twenties I went through a bit of a phase of subscribing to Pagan Wheel magazine and tried to work out what it was all about so I'd read about him somewhere.

It took about fifty minutes to find the headstone. Oddly he was buried in the Christian section - a red herring that cost me time - as surely he should have been buried in the non-conformist section? Robert belonged to the Bolton branch of the Order of Druids and was their secretary for about seven years. He died in 1864 aged 48, an average age of the era. The stone was erected by voluntary subscriptions of the brethren of the Order of Druids society. His grave is difficult to find as it's the old type and they're all seem similar when you're walking passed lots of them. I should have spotted the Druid facial engraving on the stone but missed it and I only found the stone as I had a photo of it and matched up the trees in the background with the real ones.

The legendary steeplejack Fred Dibnah is buried in the new bit so I went to say hello and do a salute.

Revisited in 2022...

Fred Dibnah is buried nearby…just giving Fred a wave…

Was Robert wrong and there is no God? Does The Big Bang theory dispel his beliefs???