StoneFlower

The farm where I live is very old and parts of it dates back till at least somewhere in the 16 hundreds probably older. While farming methods and the way the villages were organised changed radically from about 1750 and got modernised on the mainland, they were unchanged and stayed by the old habits on my island. 

From the middle ages up to the 17 hundreds people was buried in about the same way. Graveyards were very small and every village and farm had their own little part of the graveyard. When population increased the graveyards got too small for this unpractical system to continue so it was decided by the church that the graves was now going to be side by side and when the graveyard  was full, you started from the beginning again. That meant that you could risk being buried along side someone you didn't know, maybe even from another village! This was a big change for the farmers and there was a lot of complaints but the parish decided that all the farms had to remove their "family grave slab" to give room for others to be buried there. Most farmers brought their stones back to the farm where it could be used for something else.

That is why you often see old grave slabs being used as steps, fundaments or pavings on farms here on the island. "My" farm has several of them used for various things. In the old stable I found this corner piece from a grave slab, once used to mark the place where an ancestor was buried.