Matters of Grave Concern

John Owen was killed in 1873 by the fall of a crane during the building of the Settle-Carlisle railway. Tom Twistleton, a Craven dialect poet living at Winskill above Langcliffe — a brother of the Henry Lea Twistleton mentioned in the article by Jim Nelson — wrote a fifteen verse poem about the young man, including the following:

But hark! A strange sound is heard —
The crane that o’hangs them is broken;
And the heavy jib falls ere a hand call be stirr’d,
Or a sentence of warning be spoken.

This is but one of many stories which are revealed in a study of the history of the graveyard.

The Church of the Holy Ascension, Settle was built between 1836 and 1838. Settle was part of the Ancient Parish of Giggleswick, served by St Alkelda’s. The idea for a daughter Church at Settle arose due to the overcrowding of St Alkelda’s caused by the increase in Settle’s population during the early part of the century. A public meeting at the Golden Lion in early 1835 initiated the process of financing and building the Church, and this is fully documented in Brayshaw & Robinson’s Ancient Parish of Giggleswick. The cost was about £3000, of which some £1375 was raised at the meeting and the rest raised subsequently by public subscription, including a donation of £1000 from Mrs Swale of Langcliffe Hall. The first priest in charge was her son the Rev Hogarth John Swale, and its first vicarage was built in Station Road in 1856. It did not become a fully separate parish until the next vacancy in Giggleswick occurred in 1892.

The site of the Church was at what was then the edge of the town, where the New Road (now known at Church Street) began, running to Settle Bridge. This first Settle by-pass was built in 1804 to improve the turnpike and coaching route by avoiding Kirkgate. The site was small, resulting in the orientation of the building not being on the traditional east/west axis. In general the graves themselves do follow the conventional orientation. There was no railway at that time and the land was bounded to the west by a footpath leading to the mills at Langcliffe. Holy Ascension’s first graveyard, opened in 1838 and now known as the Ancient Ground, was the land immediately surrounding the church on all four sides. (Fig 1) The grave sites were referenced by using letters A to E to specify separate sections. This site reached its capacity by late 1881 and was closed. As a temporary measure a new burial area at St Alkelda’s, which had been opened in 1873, was used for new burials. There was soon concern that Giggleswick’s new ground would only suffice for 5 to 6 years, instead of the expected 15 years if Settle were using it as well.

Fortunately permission for an extension to Settle was given in 1885. This took in land to the west, up to the new railway. It also included the old footpath now diverted to the west of the railway embankment. This is now known as the Old Ground and uses a letter/number grid in an E/W axis to identify the plots.

This was again filled by about 1928 and a further extension to the north was made, now known as the New Ground, and plot identification is again on a letter/ number grid. By 1989 it was realised that this New Ground itself would soon reach the limit of its capacity for new graves. Previous strategy plans could not be brought to fruition and after much discussion Mr W R Bell of Langcliffe Hall generously gifted land to the north of the Churchyard for use as a Settle Community Cemetery and Garden of Rest. Work on this new facility is now complete and the Community Cemetery has been successfully blended in with the older Churchyard. North Craven Heritage Trust donated a sum towards the work with this result in mind. The New Ground was then closed for new graves in 1998. (Fig 2)

The imminent closure of the Churchyard provided the opportunity to summarise its burial records and the Vicar, the Rev Stewart Ridley, agreed to this. The information about nearly 3,800 burial services in four large volumes with provision for 1600 or 800 entries in each, has now been transferred to a computer database. The main advantage of this is that the computer willingly and quickly searches and rearranges the information, so that the vicar or researcher does not have to struggle through four large tomes in order, for example, to find who, and how many, are buried in Plot G 58 in the Old Ground.

Carrying out a task like this brings home forcibly not only the appaling death rate of the children of those times, but also the low average age at death of adults. In the first 10 years of its operation over 40% of the burials were infants below 10 years of age. Over 80% of those buried had failed to reach 50 years old. (Fig 3) The improvement during the late 1800s is clear to see. As an example, the equivalent figures for 1890 to 1899 (Fig 4) were 34% under 10 years of age but now 56% failed to reach the age of 50: but it took until the 1930s and 1940s before the majority of burials were persons of 60 and above, with deaths under the age of 10 being 3 or 4% of the total. Separating male and female records clearly shows the higher death rate of females in childbirth in the 1850s compared to the 1950s. (Figs 5 & 6) Despite this one of the oldest persons buried, aged 98 years, was interred as long ago as 1852. It must be emphasised that this does not provide accurate evidence of mortality rates, but merely selective evidence from one Churchyard of age at death.

Earlier records, before about 1890, do not record the full address of the deceased — only the parish or farm. Many of those who died in Giggleswick Workhouse or Infirmary were buried in the Churchyard. The individuality of the Vicars of the Church also spring out of the pages. A priest still remembered by the people of Settle as a fearsome figure in black was the Rev T F Brownbill Twemlow. After his name first appears as the officiating minister there are no more burials giving the Workhouse or Infirmary as the abode, but he does record several persons of differing surname buried in the same grave as of 1 Reins (sic) Road and later 1 Raines Road, Giggleswick. As Castleberg Hospital, formerly the Workhouse and Infirmary is the first house along Raines Road from the village centre, I believe the Rev Twemlow was trying not to attach the Workhouse address to the deceased.

Among the early records the Officiating Minister sometimes added remarks relevant to the deceased. In the case of a boy of 13 who died in 1886 he notes ‘In the Choir — drowned in the Ribble’. In 1888 it is noted that William Perkin had been sexton of the church for 46 years. Also in 1886 it is noted that a Hellifield man had been killed ‘…by a train in the recent snow storm…’ Strangely, there is no reference in the register of the circumstances of the death of John Own, mentioned above.

It is intended that copies of a print-out of the records (arranged alphabetically, chronologically and by plot) will be lodged in the Reference section of Skipton Library and possibly in Settle Library if room was available. I am able to provide information from the database in response to simple queries, but this may be subject to approval by the vicar and Parochial Church Council for more comprehensive searches.