How do we honour the dead who are buried in the Cemetery? Should our management of the Cemetery remain constant through time? What notice do we pay to Heene Cemetery being an official Local Wildlife Site? Is our thinking sufficiently in tune with our generation’s climate and environmental emergencies?
Our responses to such questions can never be uniform, but the questions deserve our attention and they merit thoughtful examination.
An easy first response is to grant individual families the right to our support if they wish a relative’s grave to be made accesible. We have a worthy tradition of doing exactly that.
Beyond the few examples when this is required, the rest of the Cemetery has been subject to an environment-first management scheme. This has functioned in conjunction with periodic grave preparation in advance of Open Days. This reciprocal compromise has worked well.
Unusually, at Heene, thanks to the work of the heritage team, many of the buried have been given virtual space on the group’s website. Accessible globally and locatable beside every grave, this rich resource offers tribute and respect of the highest order.
The new endowed graves clearing rota — which was introduced this year — would likely meet with no dissent in a cemetery that was not also a Local Wildlife Site. Yet at Heene this appears fundamentally out-of-step with current thinking. The treatment of these graves, in my view, should be subject to the broader management plan, without exception.
The merit in clearing a grave for a person with perhaps no living relatives has yet to be explained. When the clearing removes valuable flowering plants often indiscriminately, then we have truly lost our way. Better, I think, that managed vegetation adorns a grave and is prompted by subtle signage, of the kind used in St Mary’s churchyard in Kettlewell, Skipton, North Yorkshire. Their Words in Wood project use quotes from of a variety of thinkers. Below, those of the 12th century mystic, the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen, urges visitors to “gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings . . . now think”. Crafted in oak against a backdrop of living green, these surely speak with greater poignancy than any cleared grave can ever do.
Rob Tomlinson