The little Worcestershire village of Birlingham contains the most unassuming of tourist attractions. It boasts no great stately home, no noisy theme park or blowsy formal gardens, and even the church is more Victorian than ancient.

But each year about this time – sometimes a little later – the Birlingham graveyard fills up with snowdrops.

At the drop of a hat, ramblers march in from nearby Pershore or further afield, the village hall opens up for Sunday teas, and the churchyard birds sing out in excitement.

We made the pilgrimage last weekend – from Birmingham to Birlingham, twins in name only – guessing that the mild winter would have coaxed them out early, and so it proved. There were plenty more snowdrops still sat in the dug-out, but many were already out on the pitch. Theirs is the first flowery carpet of the year, outliers for the brighter blooms yet to come.

All of this is no accident of nature, nor directly attributable to divine intervention. Back in the 1860s the Rev Robert Rashleigh Duke swept into the rectory of Birlingham. With the over-confidence Victorians were prone to, Duke took out the medieval church – most of it, anyway – and put up his grander replacement.

Duke littered the churchyard with inscriptions, planted a biblical vine and fig tree either side of the porch, and generally ran amuck in a theological kind of way. His legacy is all around, not least in the old Norman arch from the former church, which the rector turned into a lychgate.

Rashleigh Duke’s daughter, Eldie, however, has left us a far kinder – perhaps more enduring – legacy. Miss Duke became a student of botany (as well as of Latin), and it was she who encouraged and supervised the planting of Birlingham’s spring flowers. Snowdrop first, then aconite and white and blue crocus (but never yellow), and cyclamen.

Well into the 1930s Miss Duke tended the graveyard, until she tenanted it instead. And each year the snowdrops come out to remember her. And at that moment the new year has properly begun.

* Dr Chris Upton is reader in Public History at Newman University Birmingham (with an “m”)