A MEMORIAL headstone may not be placed in a churchyard when the remains of the persons to be commemorated were not interred in 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 among other graves of members of the Thompson family.
Under regulation 2.2.1 of the Carlisle Diocesan Churchyard Regulations, it was unlawful for a memorial to be introduced 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 persons buried in the grave beneath it. Similarly, where a person’s ashes were buried in a churchyard, they were commonly commemorated by their name being added to a designated stone.
Since Mr and Mrs Priestley’s ashes were not buried in the churchyard at Holy Trinity, neither of those possibilities was engaged; so it was not open to the incumbent to deal with the matter under delegated authority. It was, therefore, necessary for the Chancellor to rule on Dr Heaton’s application.
Dr Heaton said that both Mr and Mrs Priestley were members of the Church of England and emphasised the strong connection that they had had to the parish and the Walthwaite Estate.
The DAC did not recommend Dr Heaton’s proposals for approval by the Chancellor. There was an assumption, the DAC stated, that the family members for whom the memorial was intended could have requested to be buried in the churchyard, but they had instead chosen to have their ashes interred at the family property, and it was not possible to know if they would have desired to be memorialised in the churchyard.
The DAC also said that picturesque churchyards throughout the Lake District had always been popular resting places, but the space that was available “should — for pragmatic and practical reasons — be retained for burials rather than family memorials”.
Individual memorials after the internment of ashes were strongly discouraged in churchyards in the diocese, the DAC said, and, in the present 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 dealt with in other dioceses. The first was in the diocese of Lincoln, where the Chancellor, His Honour the Revd and Worshipful Judge Mark Bishop, had permitted an inscription to be added at the churchyard of St Guthlac’s, Market Deeping, to an existing gravestone to commemorate the applicant’s father who had been interred elsewhere. That, however, was a proposal to add wording to an existing stone, and not, as here, to introduce a new stone solely commemorating persons who were not buried in 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 present case, because it was known that Private Walker had been buried somewhere in the churchyard of St Nicholas’s, but not precisely where.
Taking all those matters into account, Chancellor Fryer-Spedding concluded that Dr Heaton’s application should be refused because of the reasons given by the DAC, and, in particular, because there was no positive evidence that Mr and Mrs Priestley themselves would have wished to be commemorated in the way that Dr Heaton proposed. They could have made that choice, but, instead, elected to have their ashes scattered elsewhere.
