The waters they washed them ashore, ashore And they never will sail the seas no more We laid them along by the churchyard wall And all in a row we buried them all But their boots we buried below the tide On Severn-side The gulls they fly over so high, so high To the sea where their bodies all safe do lie They fly all around and loud they do call Where all in a row we buried them all But their boots we buried below the tide On Severn-side "Spoken:" The bodies of the drowned at sea were not buried at the church But at the tideline, until the Eighteen-Seventies And even when accorded Christian burial, Were never brought into the church itself But buried in the sailors' Graveyard. The sea might wish to reclaim them Many people believed, drowned sailors returned as seagulls And that according to Astral Law, A gull would attack an exhausted swimmer Who was still managing to escape his Fate, out of sheer envy of the living On many Western coasts it was the Practice, even in days of more Christian funerals To bury the boots of the dead on the tideline The waters they washed them ashore, ashore And they never will sail the seas no more We laid them along by the churchyard wall And all in a row we buried them all But their boots we buried below the tide On Severn-side