A MEMORIAL headstone might not be placed in a churchyard when the stays of the individuals to be commemorated weren’t interred within the churchyard, the Consistory Court of the diocese of Carlisle has ruled.
Dr William Andrew Heaton sought permission to introduce into the churchyard at Holy Trinity, Langdale, a headstone commemorating certain family descendants and heirs of the late John Dawson Thompson, namely Joyce Victoria Priestley and James Gordon Priestley, who had died in April 2006 and March 1992 respectively. Both had been cremated and their ashes scattered in Walthwaite Estate, a family property. Dr Heaton’s proposal was for a headstone to be positioned amongst other graves of members of the Thompson family.
Under regulation 2.2.1 of the Carlisle Diocesan Churchyard Regulations, it was illegal for a memorial to be introduced right into a churchyard without permission. The Diocesan Chancellor, the Worshipful James Fryer-Spedding, said that it was implicit in that regulation that a memorial ordinarily commemorated the person or individuals buried within the grave beneath it. Similarly, where an individual’s ashes were buried in a churchyard, they were commonly commemorated by their name being added to a chosen stone.
Since Mr and Mrs Priestley’s ashes weren’t buried within the churchyard at Holy Trinity, neither of those possibilities was engaged; so it was not open to the incumbent to cope with the matter under delegated authority. It was, subsequently, obligatory for the Chancellor to rule on Dr Heaton’s application.
Dr Heaton said that each Mr and Mrs Priestley were members of the Church of England and emphasised the strong connection that that they had needed to the parish and the Walthwaite Estate.
The DAC didn’t recommend Dr Heaton’s proposals for approval by the Chancellor. There was an assumption, the DAC stated, that the relations for whom the memorial was intended could have requested to be buried within the churchyard, but that they had as a substitute chosen to have their ashes interred on the family property, and it was impossible to know in the event that they would have desired to be memorialised within the churchyard.
The DAC also said that picturesque churchyards throughout the Lake District had at all times been popular resting places, however the space that was available “should — for pragmatic and practical reasons — be retained for burials somewhat than family memorials”.
Individual memorials after the internment of ashes were strongly discouraged in churchyards within the diocese, the DAC said, and, in the current case, the requested memorial marked neither a grave nor a burial of cremated ashes.
The PCC unanimously supported the DAC’s views.
The Chancellor had considered how two similar cases had been handled in other dioceses. The first was within the diocese of Lincoln, where the Chancellor, His Honour the Revd and Worshipful Judge Mark Bishop, had permitted an inscription to be added on the churchyard of St Guthlac’s, Market Deeping, to an existing gravestone to commemorate the applicant’s father who had been interred elsewhere. That, nevertheless, was a proposal so as to add wording to an existing stone, and never, as here, to introduce a latest stone solely commemorating individuals who weren’t buried within the churchyard.
The second was a case from the diocese of Oxford regarding St Nicholas’s, Tackley, where the Chancellor, His Honour the Worshipful Judge David Hodge KC, permitted a memorial to a soldier whose place of burial was not exactly known. But that case was also different from the current case, since it was known that Private Walker had been buried somewhere within the churchyard of St Nicholas’s, but not precisely where.
Taking all those matters into consideration, Chancellor Fryer-Spedding concluded that Dr Heaton’s application ought to be refused due to the reasons given by the DAC, and, specifically, because there was no positive evidence that Mr and Mrs Priestley themselves would have wished to be commemorated in the way in which that Dr Heaton proposed. They could have made that alternative, but, as a substitute, elected to have their ashes scattered elsewhere.
