There’s a great project happening the churchyard of St Swithun’s, Woodbury – which is also where God’s Botanist”, Revd. William Keble Martin, is buried.
Looking at the St Swithun’s Churchyard Work Diary from 2020, kept by the church warden and “completed by our wonderful volunteers over the summer”, the project is very much a joint effort with the district council’s Streetscene team.
And one of their key tasks has been successfully managing St Swithun’s Churchyard for biodiversity – which, as with many such sites, is ideal for such projects:
Burial grounds can be surprisingly rich in biodiversity and support a fantastic array of different species. Agricultural intensification, development, pollution and the everyday use of chemicals has had a negative impact on biodiversity, but burial grounds tend to escape these changes and offer us a glimpse of a past world (Caring for God’s Acre, 2020).
With some simple horticultural and ecological interventions, the churchyard can be managed to promote these rich habitats. The Church of England (2020) describes Churchyards as ‘important for their habitats and as refuges for wildlife and plant life’, and encourages management and use of churchyards in a way that is ‘appropriate and respectful’. Churchyards are also refuges for people, as well as places for burials and remembrance, so need to be managed in a sensitive way.
And the latest from Caring for God’s Acre shows that UK churchyards are havens for rare wildlife:
Churchyards are vital havens for rare wildlife including dormice, bats and beetles, according to an extensive audit of burial grounds around the UK. The conservation charity Caring for God’s Acre mapped out 20,325 cemeteries, with 800,000 wildlife records submitted and more than 10,800 species recorded.
They discovered that these quiet sites are home to a huge variety of rare wildlife, with over a quarter of species recorded featuring on the Red List of endangered species. More than 80 of these were classified as threatened, vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. The charity is highlighting the importance of churchyards for wildlife and calling for them to be protected and bolstered so they can continue to play this role.
There are more than 20,500 burial grounds across the UK, ranging from small areas of under a quarter of an acre, to expansive sites of hundreds of acres.
As for the cemeteries and churchyards of the Sid Valley, they also ‘need to be managed in a sensitive way’ – both for wildlife and for people.
And cemeteries are beautiful outdoor spaces as well – with Arnos Vale in Bristol rich in both history and wildlife, with more than 11,000 verified records listing 1,024 species:
Cemeteries as beautiful outdoor spaces – Cherishing Sidmouth Cemeteries and The South West’s oldest garden cemetery – Cherishing Sidmouth Cemeteries
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