Ramsey Mortuary Chapels Heritage and Archive Centre

By Jane Yardley – Chair, Friends of Ramsey Mortuary Chapels

Any of you that have been past the Wood Lane Cemetery recently will have noticed that the front boundary wall has been repaired thanks to Ramsey Town Council.

It had been causing concern for quite a while, but they had trouble finding a builder to fix it. Fortunately, they were able to use the same firm that have been carrying out the work on the old TSB building that is to become the new council offices. The same firm is also putting in the new toilet facilities into the chapels.

Ramsey Town Council has also formed a new Cemetery Committee, consisting of 8 council members.

They are Roger Brereton, Val Fendley, John Bufton, Miranda Clarke, Adela Costello, Conrad Maskell, Gillian Rayment and Pat Taylor.

I’m sure that if we all work together then we can do great things and restore the chapels back to their former glory, despite years of neglect.

We were asked by the council to source and obtain a large number of Victorian tiles to replace the broken and missing ones in the chapels. We were fortunate, thanks to our members Mary and Simon Ison, who must have contacted every reclamation outlet in Cambridgeshire and beyond, to find just what we wanted at Spriggs Reclamation Yard in Peterborough.

The tiles are a superb match, and we are indebted to Dave, Simon and Ollie from Spriggs, who not only delivered them and unloaded them into the chapels for us, but as a contribution to the restoration, only charged us a quarter of the cheapest quote elsewhere, what great guys!

Mary, mentioned previously, came up with the great idea of collecting all the discarded artificial flowers from the bins in the cemetery and reusing them to make new floral tributes and wreaths. She takes them home and washes them and in some cases re dyes them. This saves them from going into landfill.

A group of us get together to make them and then we place them onto graves who seem to have no visitors or family to care for them, especially the graves in the Victorian part of the cemetery.

Don’t forget that it’s Heritage Day on Sunday 10th September. Although the chapels will be closed all the other heritage sites will be open and there will be a lot to enjoy on Abbey Green and Church Green where we will have a fund-raising stall.

So come along and support and celebrate Ramsey’s past so that it has a future.

We look forward to seeing you there.

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