This presentation reports on a research task undertaken for English Heritage: to devise and test a framework for establishing the significance of burial space for use in the planning process. The framework had to encompass a range of circumstances in which burial has taken place, from deep time Neolithic barrows, to historic cemeteries and churchyards and modern war cemeteries and woodland burial sites. The framework also needed to accommodate ‘marginal’ sites including institutional burial grounds and battlefields and be compliant with the National Policy Planning Framework significance categories. The devised framework was tested in 29 sites, and this paper reflects on both the processes and difficulties.