Tales from valley of the dead

It looked like 14 old graves, but beneath were 150 sets of remains telling a remarkable chapter in the history of Victorian Yorkshire, including a link with Mick Jagger. Roger Ratcliffe reports.

The little parish church of St Michael and St Lawrence is a picture of serenity tucked away among trees in the Washburn Valley to the west of Harrogate, and those who discover it are apt to use the words “hidden gem”. Just a few cottages remain of its nearest village, Fewston, because most of the congregation was displaced in the 1870s when the Leeds Waterworks Company flooded the valley to supply the city’s taps. However, the chain of reservoirs couldn’t drown the area’s rich history, and it was to help keep it alive that churchgoers decided to graft onto the side of the medieval tower a new building they named the Washburn Heritage Centre. Before it could be constructed, there was the small matter of sensitively relocating 14 headstones and the graves beneath them.

But when Northallerton archaeologist John Buglass began excavations he uncovered an astonishing 154 sets of remains. First impressions suggested there could be some fascinating tales to tell, so with the help of £63,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund it was decided to investigate the story behind this extraordinary burial ground.

The Fewston Assemblage, as the project has become known, is Yorkshire’s very own

Meet the Ancestors. And to bring two of the churchyard’s dead as close to life as possible, facial reconstructions were commissioned from the same team that created the likeness of Richard