Photo-a-Day  (Tuesday, 2nd July, 2019)

Just what is going on ???. over to you Reverend David.

This is awful, worse than yesterdays bleak photo.

I know that cemeteries are expensive to maintain but this should not be allowed to happen. My Mum & Dad are buried at Gidlow and that is quite beautiful so why is this such a mess?

subsidence?when i walked there around the oldest part the ground was very soft and spongy

Those headstones don't look all that old.

What a sad scene. This is Wigan Cemetery, down Cemetery Road, where the crematorium is. Ince Cemetery is the one on Warrington Road, which you overlook when driving past. There has always been confusion over them. When I was a little girl in Ince, people used to have a walk to the cemetery on Sunday afternoons, wearing their best clothes and carrying flowers to put on loved ones' graves. There was even a flower stall at the top of Cemetery Road at weekends. To see this sad photo makes me treasure the memories of my childhood; days when we had very little but the world was a nicer place.

I'm reminded of the epitaph on Shakespeare's grave..
'Blest be the man who spares these stones and cursed be he who moves my bones'.

Helen, it might be bleak but this photo is showing what is really going on in some places around Wigan.
Well done Mick.

Its always good to find headstones when doing family history - you can find more information you didn't know about. Also the expense involved when families erected them.... It doesn't seem right to just take them down and toss them to one side.

Graves are leased, after a set period of time, anything between 25 and 100 years family of the deceased are invited to renew the lease. If they choose not to the owners of the graveyard are legally entitled to remove any headstones and even place another coffin in there. It's nothing sinister, it's how the system works.

Those headstones are by the back wall which collapsed a few years ago damaging quite a lot of them. Thought they would have been put back by now.

It seems sacred ground is only sacred if the owners can profit from it ! Still, if you've rented a narrow small four walled
flat all your life why deny the landlord, even in our demise ,rent for an even smaller one?

They're not getting any rent off me - I've made my mind up - I'm being scattered to the four winds! ( apologies to any ancestry hunters in another two hundred years!)