The area of the cemetery that we decided to clear first brought an unexpected finding – a row of children’s graves. We believe there are six, although only five have kerbstones which suggests that the sixth is an unmarked grave.
Most of the hard clearance work in this area has now been done which begs the question of “what next?” here. It has always been the plan to gradually plant up the graves and surroundings but we feel that that could be a waste of time at this stage because of the high likelihood of remaining roots and weed seeds in the graves.
So we are trying out an intermediate strategy – to cover the graves with weed-membrane and mulch and mark each grave with a small plant buried in its own pot for ease of lifting next year. We have started this with four of the children’s graves, each of which now has its own pot of lavender. The following photos show the steps:
Teignmouth Old Cemetery 