The Church of England have embarked on an ambitious plan to map all of their burial grounds and churchyards using the latest laser scanning techniques. The All Hallows’ Churchyard in Kirkburton was lucky enough to be chosen as a pilot for this exciting new technology. A company called Atlantic Geomatics, who are experts in geospatial mapping, were able to map and record our chuch grounds. Please see the link below to visit the web site at https://kirkburton.burialgrounds.co.uk/
Grave Records
Every week a member of the team would be approached by a visitor asking for the location of his or her relative’s grave. A search through the photocopy of the churches records (the originals are held in Wakefield) would give some indication to a site of burial but the records are not complete and the plans bear no relation to the ground as it is today.
The Old Graveyard was divided up into areas named after prominent families, or a Team Member, who had done most to turn a wilderness into a site suitable for a Jane Austin serial.
The areas were then mapped, with graves entered as Marked or Not Marked, which meant it had no stone (but was a mound of grave shape), or the grave had some stone slab or surround with no inscriptions. These may have been removed or destroyed during the last 200 years.
John Wakley’s Inscription Records
The graveyard around the All Hallows Church, in Kirkburton, has more than 2000 graves with over 5000 inscriptions. As a volunteer in the award-winning Kirkburton Churchyard Team, John Wakley would regularly be tidying the grounds and noticed that people interested in tracing their family relatives often had troubles because the exact location of the grave they were looking for was unknown, or sometimes the inscriptions had become illegible over time. To preserve this historic record, and to make the searching a lot easier, Mr Wakley recorded the inscriptions, plotted each gravestone on his hand-drawn maps, and made the records available to the wider community. We remember his efforts in the Churchyard by having the main path through the churchyard named Wakley Way in his memory in 2019.