If, like me, you enjoy walking through old cemeteries and reading the inscriptions on the headstones you will find the views of this ‘Spectator’ thought provoking. At the beginning of 1881 the cemetery question was upper most in the thoughts of many Swindonians.

A cemetery should be a wooded garden, with walks and avenues and glades according to its size, and not, as in most villages now, a stonemason’s yard, studded with squat temples and tombs, or with tall, meaningless headstones so mouldy that it would be nearly impossible to read the inscriptions, even if the undertakers did not have them made as illegible as possible, in order to “make business” of the work of cleaning them out. These headstones are the destruction of all beauty or solemnity in a graveyard. Nothing uglier or more meaningless in form has ever been conceived by man, and nothing worse adapted for exhibiting an inscription. If they are upright, they gradually sway out of the perpendicular with their own weight; and if they are flat, they destroy the reverential vegetation which else, without means, watchfulness or exertion, would, but for the stones, clothe the surface of the grave. They are, besides, utterly needless. What is required by each grave is a number cut in granite – cut solid, we mean, not out of granite – a number distinguishable for centuries, and referring to a granite tablet, which need not be more than six inches by a foot, with an inscription identifying, describing, and, if you will, praising the dead. – Spectator

The Swindon Advertiser, Monday, January 3, 1881

Swindon Borough Council workers have recently done a grand job at the cemetery. I am sharing here some photographs taken by Kevin a CWGC and dedicated Radnor Street Cemetery volunteer.

This path clearing project is a work in progress by our own dedicated volunteers