Hitchin Cemetery June-July 2025
Hitchin Cemetery June-July 2025
The Friends of Hitchin Cemetery group have been busy with their very popular free tours; the final two were in July as part of The Hitchin Festival. There have been various other visitations and trips of differing sorts, more of which later.
The Friday working party, amongst various tasks, have trimmed the grass to highlight graves near the Standhill Road entrance, including those of the Reverends Gainsford (senior and junior). This work fits in with the tone for the older part of the cemetery where meadow regions are surrounded by short mown grass giving a mixture of formal and informal areas. The two Gainsfords were both vicars of Holy Saviour church and the church has recently paid for some plants to enhance the larger of the two graves, working to a design by local author Nic Wilson: her recent series of articles in Gardening World magazine has been on the theme of 'Make a metre matter' and we have been lucky to have her services provided for free.
The first visit to report on is that of a large group of Americans who came to visit the graves of some Roman Catholic priests. In the late 1800s various catholic orders left France because of government legislation aimed at reducing the power of certain religious groups and in 1902 two priests from the Order of Saint Edmund arrived in Hitchin and helped found the Catholic Boys School, St Michael's College which ran from 1903 to 1968. At around the same time priests from the same order founded another St Michael's College in Vermont, hence our American visitors. Luckily the graves in question happened to have received significant TLC from the Friends Group and were in good shape for our American guests.
The grave of fathers I. Lévèque, A Prével and others.
A warm day in June gave perfect conditions for a different kind of visit, which was a "rapid grassland assessment" performed by Caroline and Michael from Herts County Council's Countryside & Rights of Way team. The method involved choosing ten 1m by 1m squares spread over the older part of the cemetery and measuring the height of vegetation and noting the number of species of flowers and grasses, noting especially any species which are 'good' (there are 23 possible species) and 'bad' indicators (there are 6 possibles). Good indicators are more delicate plants which cannot compete with vigorous neighbours such as fine grasses and the cemetery squares had 19 out of 23 good species found! Bad indicator plants can actually be extremely good for wildlife such as Nettle and Ragwort, but these plants can be dominant and shade neighbours out of existence, the cemetery squares had 2 out of 6 such species found. Overall results indicate the excellent meadow health of the cemetery and assessments in future years will be able to check that the cemetery grasslands are being properly maintained. In England there have been immense losses of quality grassland over the last 100 years and it is extremely important to look after what remains.
During July some exchange visits took place between us and the people involved with Bishops Stortford cemetery. There is an intention to set up a cemetery Friends group in Bishops Stortford involving several groups including the town council who own the cemetery and they are looking for examples of best practice, so we feel somewhat honoured to be asked for ideas! Our visit there was on a Friday morning and we could see that the large cemetery is an important feature of the town, with a somewhat grander feel with, two flint-built chapels and more trees than Hitchin, including some huge specimens. There was a higher proportion of monuments, meaning the areas of plain grassland were not as extensive. We enjoyed our visit and it looks as though if a Friends group is formed it will not be short of work and we wish them well in the future.
Back to Hitchin and some reports of the wildlife visiting the cemetery. Many people have noted that in England this year has been a better year than of recent for butterflies (and other insects) and the same has been true locally, below are some shots taken in the cemetery: notice how the diversity of flowers attracts a diversity of insects.
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