A haunting journey through Horton Cemetery in Epsom, where thousands of pauper patients, mostly women, from five nearby mental asylums were buried. It is now an abandoned, derelict, and overgrown site, where all grave markers have been removed, except one.

The footage is overlaid with words drawn from the medical case notes of some of the patients buried there. Written by the medical and nursing staff, the words describe the patients’ occupations, behaviour, mental states, and diagnoses. They offer a glimpse into what was known about mental illness and attitudes towards pauper patients in Victorian times.

The film is also overlaid with images of a diaphanous, disembodied dress, which has been recreated by a seamstress in the style of the standard-issue dresses that were made, mended and worn by female patients in Victorian asylums. It alludes to the many absent women who have now merged with the soil in the woodland.

The accompanying music, specially commissioned and inspired by a visit to the Cemetery, is elegiac and spectral. It seeks to give voice to those who were voiceless, and to serve as a requiem to the long forgotten.