Burial database project wins £600k
The project will create the first national burial sites database for England and Wales
Burial grounds are a fundamental repository of the nation’s heritage
The first national database of biological, heritage and historical information about burial sites in England and Wales will be created thanks to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).
The charity Caring for God’s Acre, which is dedicated to conserving and celebrating burial grounds, received a £586,700 grant, funded by the National Lottery, for its four-year Beautiful Burial Ground Project.
The aim of the project is to gather together all the information about burial grounds, hosted on an existing National Biodiversity Network database recording the wildlife they contain. It will also tell researchers where they can find other resources, such as a history of the area or transcriptions of monument inscriptions in local archives.
Harriet Carty, director of Caring for God’s Acre, told Who Do You Think You Are?
Magazine that burial grounds are “a fundamental repository of the nation’s heritage and really brilliant places that deserve to be preserved and celebrated and visited more”.
However, she warned that there is currently “very little known about an awful lot of churchyards”, and that researchers struggle to uncover information about burial grounds because there’s no central repository.
She added that the aim of the project is to create a database where “you’ll be able to find out with a few clicks what is already known about a site”. Caring for God’s Acre aims to launch the website later this year.
The first step is to find out which burial sites already have records of information, such as monument inscriptions. Carty is keen for family history groups, community groups, parish church councils and other organisations to share their research with the charity.
As the project progresses, it will run training events on recording burial grounds information, and may be able to provide small funding grants.
Carty added that Caring for God’s Acre is “open to all sorts of ideas and suggestions” from relevant groups.
The charity will also partner with the Church Heritage Record, the Church of England’s website containing more than 16,000 entries on its buildings ( facultyonline.churchofengland.org/churches). Over 40 other partner organisations will be involved, including the National Biodiversity Network Trust, the Church in Wales, Historic England and Natural England.
Carty emphasised that the project is aiming to record information about burial grounds used by all religions and denominations, including Catholic, nonconformist, Jewish and Muslim sites: “There are other really interesting sites we would love to know more about.”
The project will also record the plant and animal life in burial grounds, which are often remarkably rich in biodiversity because they contain some of the last undisturbed grassland left in the British countryside. This allows a variety of plants, including wildflowers and meadow grasses, to grow there, which in turn support a wide range of animal life, from birds, bees and butterflies to frogs, toads, mice and voles.
Ros Kerslake, chief executive of the HLF, said: “Our burial grounds are truly precious community spaces.”
Find out more at caringforgodsacre.org.uk.