Closure

What happened after closure

Closure did not immediately produce the landscape we see today.

Horton Cemetery had once been a deliberately landscaped and maintained burial ground, with an avenue of trees, planting, paths, railings, its small chapel and scattered headstones. Council documentation confirms that it continued to possess recognisable cemetery features after burials had ceased.

Then those features began to disappear.

Headstones were moved after closure. By the 1980s, before the cemetery was sold, families were given an opportunity through a notice in the local press to retrieve relatives’ stones; those left behind were destined for destruction. The Friends record the remarkable survival of one such stone, belonging to Marjorie Ethel Young, after an engineer saw it in a skip and rescued it.

The tin chapel disappeared.

The headstones disappeared.

In 1983, the Regional Health Authority sold the land to Michael Heighes of Marque Securities in Kingswood. Mr. Heighes seemed to have no interest in maintaining the land as a cemetery; he has ignored all contact the charity has attempted to make, and remains the owner and a property developer.

The people beneath the ground remained.