Caring for God’s Acre, a charity dedicated to conserving and celebrating burial grounds and encouraging a holistic approach to management, would like your help in developing their project to provide information and support to those managing churchyards and burial grounds.

Despite brimming with natural, built and cultural heritage, burial grounds are surprisingly under-recorded. In particular there is scant biodiversity data; individual naturalists or groups rarely record here and when they do, records go into national systems which are not site specific but based on Ordinance Survey grid squares.

The project will address this, putting burial grounds literally on the heritage map by:

  • Creating a bespoke database with interactive map where individual burial sites can be mapped, linking biological records to a particular site, easily accessed by all and linked to national systems
  • Encouraging citizen science, historical and cultural recording and research to give a holistic picture of the whole range of heritage present.
  • Establishing regional partnerships in England and Wales, where people new to this type of recording are supported via events, workshops and other resources.

Churchwardens would have access to data that can inform their decisions and help them interpret the importance of the site to the wider community, help with lottery bids or raise their profile with local media.

They hope to encourage people to learn about and get involved in these places and having got through the first stage of Lottery Funding, they now need people’s opinions in order to shape the project.

Caring for God’s Acre would like you to take part in one of two surveys which will take about 2 minutes to fill in.

For those interested in recording the built heritage such as memorials, please fill in https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/localhist

For those interested in recording wildlife, please fill in https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/burialground

More information about the Beautiful Burial Ground Project can be found on the Caring for God’s Acre website.