This paper examines a project on-going at Mary Immaculate College Limerick since 2010. Exploring the place of Mount St Lawrence Cemetery in life of Limerick city (1855 to the present), the project has four distinguishing features: (a) It involves co-operation between a third level institution, a municipal authority, and local communities; (b) It brings together seasoned and novice researchers – faculty, postgraduates and undergraduates and (c) It combines research in contemporary documentary sources, digitisation of the cemetery registers, […]

The Edinburgh Graveyards Project encompasses the three kirkyards of St Cuthbert’s, Greyfriars and Canongate and the two burial grounds of Calton Old and Calton New. The Project draws together existing information on these sites and develops this knowledge through new research linked to the following aims: to develop a body of knowledge relating to the graveyards that will help to improve our understanding and valorisation of the graveyards; to assess the current patterns of ‘use’ of the five graveyards and the potential for positive improvement; […]

Cemeteries and graveyards can intrigue, entice and transport the visitor. With their contradictory qualities of being open and yet closed, harbouring life and death, and bringing nature and architecture into close proximity they foster a sense of mystery; they have the power of dark enchantment. Enchantment comes about when a person is entranced or captivated by an event or place. The simple juxtaposition of the extraordinary within the quotidian can, arguably, bring about a shift or transformation from a disengaged to an enchanted state. […]

Private cemetery companies flourished in Britain from the 1820s only to be challenged thirty years later by Burial Boards. Whilst the creation of public cemeteries temporarily suspended the involvement of the commercial sector in burial provision, proprietary cemeteries re-emerged in London during the 1870s with further enterprises following in the twentieth century. This paper examines the development of three private cemeteries established between 1909 and 1914. Drawing from reports in trade journals, company documentation and other archival material, […]

This paper will examine the life and career of William Ross McKelvie (1825-1893), one the more prominent cemetery designers of the mid-Victorian era in Scotland.  Born in rural Wigtownshire in 1825, William McKelvie was appointed Superintendent of Parks and Cemeteries in Greenock in 1852, aged just 26.  From there, he moved to Dundee in 1863, where he spent the last thirty years of his working life in a similar capacity, dying in post in 1893.  Although early records describe McKelvie as a gardener, […]

This forum has regularly addressed the legal, the topographical, sociological, anthropological, archaeological and political aspects of the Victorian burial ground. It is certainly important that we try to understand cemeteries, then and since, from as many perspectives as we possibly can. However it strikes me that throughout, we have rarely considered the ritual aspects of burial during the heyday of the Victorian garden cemetery. What did Victorian mourners actually do in the cemetery? What about the catalogue of folk beliefs and customs which attended the burial liturgy, […]

In the England, burial boards were set up following the passage of the Burial Acts from 1852. This legislation was subject to modification: a new Burial Act was passed in practically every year of the 1850s, and further Burial Acts followed until the final Act was passed in 1906. The acts were accompanied by a set of ministry ‘directives’ on cemetery management. These directives presented best practice guidance based on scientific evidence, and were produced by the General Board of Health. […]

Cemeteries occupy a paradoxical position in contemporary UK cities: they are at the same time public and often civically run, and private intimate spaces of grief and remembrance.  Further, they are second only to parks in terms of size of urban open green space yet largely forgotten in both policy and academic planning literature.  This paper aims to explore the meaning of some of these contradictions through the use of Lefebvre’s threefold conceptualisation of space, to see how official and unofficial interpretations of cemeteries coexist and conflict, […]

Individuals around the world engage in one common yet fundamental activity that is of personal, emotional, social and environmental significance – disposal of the dead. As the global landscape becomes increasingly populated, so disposal choice becomes a critical environmental issue. Disposal of the dead is an essential aspect of our existence; it is an inevitable activity which cannot be avoided. As recognition grows regarding the need to move towards a more sustainable form of existence, so the way of thinking must change amongst individuals, […]

In 1945, the City of Edinburgh took up its responsibilities for post-War reconstruction. Allocating sufficient space for needs of housing, schools, agriculture, transport and burials proved increasingly complex. The Victorian solution had been to supplement the old parish churchyards by a reliance on private cemeteries but only three more private cemeteries had been opened between 1898 and 1928. Warriston Crematorium was opened in 1929 and by 1939 was the place of committal for one-sixth of the City’s deaths. […]

This paper will describe the lengthy process from 1868 – 1947 by which the Anglican Church of Wales came to be disestablished, and the consequences for its burial grounds. The paper will shed some light on  what may happen to a Church’s property (which will include its burial  grounds if it has any) when a Church is disestablished, and remark on the fate, after disestablishment, of any public rights that exist in the burial grounds at the time of disestablishment, […]

This paper explores the implications of natural burial for the funeral profession. Its discussion is underpinned by data gathered during a three-year ESRC funded project which explored the cultural, social and emotional implications of natural burial in the UK. The paper’s arguments are supported by data from interviews with funeral directors who fall into three discrete groups: 1) individuals who extended disposal options for their bereaved clientele through buying land in order to accommodate natural burial; […]

This paper is concerned with identifying if there are distinctions between natural burial sites and other more familiar, ‘traditional’ burial places using the case study woodland burial ground of my doctoral research. This particular site is consecrated and affiliated to the Church of England. The provider’s aim is to establish a deciduous native woodland, hence why the site is referred to as a ‘woodland’ burial ground. On the one hand the legal aspects of this provision make the site similar to a churchyard, […]

Theoretical debate on cemeteries generally relates to one of two discourses: that cemeteries demonstrated the hold of middle-class ideals on the construction of urban environments, where even in the realms of death the expression of status and class were a central concern; and that the cemetery was essentially a modern phenomenon that displaced and marginalized the dead, so reflecting a profound societal unease with evidence of mortality. These models position the cemetery very firmly in the context of the nineteenth-century city, […]

Cemeteries are frequently sites of contestation. Grave owners and cemetery managers; clergy and the public; interest groups and mourners; ‘romantics/conservationists’ and ‘tidiers’; new and traditional user groups – to cite a few of the groups that can sometimes find themselves in opposition. The living and the dead rarely seem to be pitched in battle, though ‘ the liminal power of the mourner’ (Turner, 1969) sometimes seems to invoke the dead to render the living more powerful or dominant in contest. […]

This paper presents ongoing PhD research examining the legal framework, rules and regulations of the Church of England relating to disposal of the dead with some comparison with state regulation. The paper reviews the roles of the PCC and incumbent as regulators and policy makers in the churchyard. A key point in the research is establishing the functional public authority status of the PCC for s6(3)(b) and 6(5) Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) (contra to finding of House of Lords in Wallbank litigation) by reference to the on-going case law usually linked to social housing and care homes for the elderly, […]

This paper offers a case study of burial and commemoration at York Cemetery from 1837 to 1901. The cultural significance of cemeteries is embodied by their design as a specific form of burial landscape and by their use as an arena to express social relationships as signified by the selection of a burial plot, funeral service, memorial and inscription and by visits to the gravesite. York Cemetery’s own unique history was embedded within the nationwide – indeed international – movement to establish modern cemeteries. […]

The paper explores the reasons why people are choosing natural burial, either for themselves or a deceased relative/friend.  It presents data from a 3 year ESRC-funded programme of empirical work in UK natural burial grounds which is exploring the extent to which natural burial represents: creative resistance to modernist disposal strategies, as epitomised in the cemetery; an aspect of the re-enchantment of death and a resurgence of Victorian romanticism; a form of ecological immortality expressed in a  more collective response to death; […]

The Spanish ‘Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919 killed tens of million worldwide. In England it is estimated that around 228,000 died during the three ‘waves’ – June/July, October/November 1918 and in February the following year. While much research has been carried out into the onset and spread of the Pandemic, issues concerning disposal of the dead have received little attention. Drawing on range of archive materials, including newspaper reports, council minutes, Medical Officer of Health reports, cemetery registers and funeral directors’ records, […]

This paper will examine the aetiology of ‘exhumation from lawful burial’ (ELB) in the context of criminal investigations, with specific reference to the secular and ecclesiastical law. It will also examine how ELB has become a valuable part of the crime investigators armoury of investigative strategies concerning death enquiries. Historically, the use of ELB by Coroners appears to have been common-place as the deceased were buried speedily after death. There was a requirement for the coroner and jury to view the body before he (the coroner) deliberated upon the cause(s) of death. […]