It is the custom, when someone dies, to ring the church bell. This alerts people to the fact that someone has died – and also alerts them to the fact that the funeral is likely to be later on that day.
Last week the bell rang and we wondered who it was for, and later than day we bumped into the funeral procession, walking from the church to the cemetery. But it was only yesterday that I found out that the person who had died had done so in a terrible freak accident. They got killed on the train track. Their car had stalled going over the steep bump in the crossing and it got hit by a train. But the really tragic thing about the accident was that there are only two trains a day in both directions, so the chances of an accident like this would be very slim.