As part of the Heritage Open Days event this September, I will be conducting short, guided churchyard walks at St. Mary’s Church, Lydiard Park. These will take place at 2pm and 3pm Saturday September 11 (today) and Sunday September 12 (tomorrow) and at the same time next weekend Saturday 18 and Sunday 19 September.
This memorial, just inside the churchyard gates, records the burial of Jonas Clarke who died on March 31, 1862 aged 74. The names of his two young grandchildren Cordelia Ann Carey and her brother Jonas Carey are also mentioned although they are not recorded in the burial registers so it is possible they were buried elsewhere.
Jonas was born in Minety in 1787 where he spent his early adult life. He married Elizabeth Fitchew in 1816 but the marriage proved to be unsuccessful and by 1818 he had entered into a relationship with Alice Pinnell. The couple had seven children but had to wait more than thirty years for the death of Elizabeth before they could marry.
Their children were baptised at All Saints’ Church, Oaksey and St Michael’s, Brinkworth and took the names Clarke Pinnell. Various Clarke Pinnell marriages took place at St. Mary’s, Lydiard Tregoze including a double wedding on May 4, 1841 when Sarah Clark Pinnell married Thomas Hall, a yeoman from Broad Blunsdon and her sister Jane married Francis Carey, a yeoman, also from Broad Blunsdon. The girls’ parents Jonas and Alice were eventually able to marry at St. Mary’s in 1853.
Jonas Clarke, farmed at Wick Farm just beyond the entrance to Lydiard Park, next to the Rectory, from about 1839 until his death in 1862, when his son Jonas Jnr took over. Farm accounts dated 1869 reveal that during the month of June, Wick Farm produced an average of three cheeses a day, over 90 in total during that month. In October of the same year there were 110 cheeses in the cheese room weighing over three tons.
The area around St. Mary’s church and Lydiard House was developed in the 1980s and 90s when street names were often taken from ancient field names. Two fields on Wick Farm called Green Down and the Green Down Mead were adopted for the new Secondary School. (The school has since changed its name to Lydiard Park Academy). The Prinnells estate takes its name from one of the Wick Farm fields, as does the area known as Freshbrook.
Radnor Street Cemetery 