Headstones in safe hands

Only ten headstones out of 15,000 in Newark Cemetery have been found to be unsafe in a check that has taken four years to complete.

The checks have been carried out to comply with health and safety legislation according to guidelines issued by the Institute of Burial and Cremation Administration.

Balderton Town Council is about to begin a similar exercise in St Giles’ churchyard and cemetery.

Newark is ahead of many towns and has completed testing on all of the headstones. A second round is about to start because the headstones must be checked every five years.

This means that a trained person has to test that headstones are safe and stable to ensure they do not fall on anybody, including staff, contractors and visitors. The review was sparked by the deaths of youngsters in Huddersfield and Preston when gravestones fell on them.

The test involves a trained person exerting force on the headstone and then assessing whether it moves too much.

Headstones are meant to give way by only a couple of millimetres each way.

The results from Newark cemetery have been stored on a database. The ten insecure headstones have been staked.

Mr James Radley, the town council’s environmental services manager, said that all landowners now had a duty of care to anybody on their land.

He said a notice was placed on any headstones that failed the test and the family must then get a stonemason to repair it.

Mr Radley said that three newly trained staff at the cemetery were about to start on the next round of testing.

He said that the way headstones were put in place had changed dramatically over time but on the whole it was the older ones that were more stable because they were much heavier and bigger than modern headstones. There was a larger ground anchor because a third of the headstone was underground. Mr Radley said that even the large ones that were at an angle were mainly safe.

He said that it was mostly graves dating from the war years that had failed the test.

More modern headstones have stainless steel rods vertically through them from the ground or wire running horizontally through them.

Mr Radley said that modern headstones would pass the headstone test for around 20 or 30 years.

The cost of repair if a headstone fails must be met by the owners of the grave.

Mr Radley said it was a problem tracing the owners of older graves, but they had traced up to 80% of the grave-owners so far.

Mr Roger Brown, a director of E. Gill and Sons funeral directors and stonemasons in Newark, said that it cost £120 to repair the headstones and this could be carried out in a day.