Biddulph Town Council welcomes all visitors to our Burial Grounds and requests that visitors respect the peace, dignity and reverence of the facilities.
Our Burial Grounds are communal spaces for quiet reflection and remembering loved ones.
Biddulph Town Burial Ground is situated at the rear of St Lawrence’s Churchyard, north of the town centre on the A527.
Woodhouse Burial Ground is sited off Woodhouse Lane (at the rear of the bowling green on Congleton Road). It was opened in 2014. It has a lawn style layout, with graves running foot-to-foot. The grass around them is kept mown by Biddulph Town Council’s grounds maintenance contractor. With the exception of the occasion of burial service, no flowers, plants or other items are permitted to be placed on or in the ground of the burial plot. A small tribute can be left on the memorial.
Woodhouse Burial Ground can be accessed from Woodhouse Lane (ST8 7DP) and St Lawrence’s from Congleton Road (ST8 7RG).
There is footpath access between the two sites through the woodland Bateman Walk, once the private ‘Lime Walk’ created in the 19th century by James Bateman to allow his family to attend church from his Biddulph Grange estate. Today the walk is divided by a locked gate, with the northern section lying within the National Trust’s Biddulph Grange Garden. On Heritage Open Days, the gates are opened, enabling visitors to recreate the route James Bateman used. The walk is managed by the Town Council and the Rotary Club of Biddulph.
The Town Burial Ground, Woodhouse Burial Ground and St Lawrence’s closed churchyard (a closed churchyard is a churchyard with no vacant plots; officially closed by the diocese) are all maintained by Biddulph Town Council.
Burials take place regularly. You may find graves being re-opened for a burial next to your family grave. Every effort is made to minimise any disruption to you and your family.
In addition, other activities may be being carried out (for example, monumental masons could be working graveside near to your family grave or our grounds maintenance contractors might be cutting the grass, or repairing pathways, etc). The main maintenance is the regular mowing which takes place between March and October, approximately every 2-3 weeks, accompanied by strimming around the graves.
It is not the ground maintenance contractor’s responsibility to clean memorials.
Sometimes, you may find the ground conditions wet and muddy due to the climatic conditions in which we live. We apologise for this, however, we do make every effort to alleviate the conditions by placing land drains within each section of the Burial Grounds.