This paper will examine Limerick’s Mount Saint Lawrence in the context of the development of Irish municipal cemeteries. It will examine the circumstances of their establishment, their governance, dimensions, religious affiliation and funerary art. From 1830, garden cemeteries appeared all over Ireland. One of the first and most unusual was St Josephs in Cork which was founded by temperance reformer Fr Theobald Mathew when he purchased the defunct Botanic Gardens there in 1830. Dublin acquired two large cemeteries in the same decade, […]

This paper is taken from a dissertation which is the first large scale study focussing on a substantial group of individuals deposited in catacombs over a significant time period.  It summarises a variety of social characteristics of more than 600 people deposited in the Terrace Catacombs in Highgate Cemetery, London, during 1839-1878.  Using primary records, the demographics, occupations, prosperity, residence at time of death and relationships to others interred in the Terrace Catacombs are shown. The data reveal a largely homogeneous social group of prosperous people mostly from residential areas near to Highgate.  […]

Mors ianua vitae: death is the gate of life. This Christian topos found literal embodiment in a group of churchyard portals. Each sported emblems of mortality – skulls, skeletons, and most spectacularly the Last Judgment. Originally numbering just over a dozen, these unusual examples of Anglican architecture parlante are considered as a group for the first time. Their most likely initial source lay in Amsterdam. Hendrick de Keyser’s designs for doors to major new churches constituted over half the plates in Architectura Moderna (1631), […]

Studies of the material culture of cemeteries often concentrate on funerary monuments, chapels and other visible structures. This paper, by contrast, looks below the surface of the Glasgow Necropolis (first burial 1832) to examine rock-cut and brick-lined graves, family vaults, trenches for common burials, chambers for temporary burial and proposed catacombs. It also discusses the drains. This presentation will show that Scotland’s first ornamental, or garden, cemetery was as innovative below the ground as it was above, […]

The introduction of garden cemeteries in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century has been seen as heralding a radical change in attitudes towards burial and commemoration. By the turn of the twentieth century a new form of cemetery aesthetic, the lawn cemetery, started to emerge. Until recently, lawn cemeteries have largely been viewed as a triumph of the economy of management over cultural values and as evidence of society’s emotional disengagement with death.  […]

The crudeness of crafting inscriptions on headstones declined in the late eighteenth century, even though some headstones were crafted using calligraphic inscriptions. This shift in styles reflected a change from a craft to an industry.  The use of varied inscription styles was meant to aid in differentiating the different types of text. However, the choice of font was also, to some extent, meant to match the shape and decorative motifs chosen for the headstone. In some cases, […]

The cemetery movement (ca. 1825-1850) was partly a reaction to the decay of Anglican churchyards and crypts, particularly in cities. Through private capital, promoters built cemeteries independent of parochial authorities, fuelled by a demand from wealthy urban classes and Nonconformists for alternative burial options. However, the Church’s reaction to these projects proved uneven: at a time when State-sponsored church construction was at its zenith, some viewed cemeteries as undermining the church’s spiritual monopoly over the dead, […]

The origins of the superintendent can be traced back to the establishment of proprietary cemeteries in the mid-nineteenth century. Responsible for day-to-day operations including supervision of grave preparation and routine maintenance along with administration and staffing, the remit has gained complexity through increased bureaucratisation and legislation, the preference for cremation and more recently from customer focus and centralisation of the service. Whilst the contemporary function has been comparatively well documented, little has been written about the development of the occupation in the early twentieth century. […]

Many historic cemeteries have only escaped from clearance or dereliction because of campaigns and direct management by friends’ groups. Despite a growing interest in cemeteries among conservation professionals in recent years, the involvement of local groups remains crucial, particularly for cemeteries of local rather than national interest. There has however been little examination of the factors behind the involvement of friends’ groups and the resulting impact of their work on cemetery character. Historic cemeteries are rich in meaning and local value, […]

The advent of the Industrial Revolution in the second part of the eighteenth-century England was fuelled by the invention of mechanical devices such as the hydraulic pump.  The adoption of this machine had a fundamental impact in trade, commerce as well as transport. Its influence eventually reached out to unusual applications such as that of the catafalque – a mechanical device based on the principle of the hydraulic pump – which became a fashionable feature in nineteenth-century Victorian necropolises. […]

The first of the Burial Acts were introduced in the 1850s, and discussion of this legislation generally focuses on the mid-century period. However, it is arguably the case that the most radical of the Burial Acts was the penultimate Act, passed in 1900. This Act – unlike earlier Burial Acts – did not favour the interests of the Church of England and was decidedly secular in tone. Rather than presuming that each cemetery would be consecrated, […]

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, […]