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Re Field Road Cemetery, Bloxwich

Lichfield Consistory Court: Eyre Ch, 18 May 2014 Exhumation – new cemetery – family grave

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2014

Ruth Arlow*
Affiliation:
Chancellor of the Diocese of Norwich
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Abstract

Type
Case Notes
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical Law Society 2015 

The petitioner sought to exhume his father's remains from consecrated ground at Field Road Cemetery, Bloxwich, for their proposed re-interment in a new municipal cemetery which lay on land that the deceased had farmed. The petitioner argued that the opening of the new cemetery constituted exceptional circumstances justifying exhumation and re-burial. The petitioner intended to create a family grave at the new cemetery by re-interring his father alongside his mother in the new cemetery. His mother remained unburied pending the decision about exhumation of his father. The chancellor noted that the categories of exceptional circumstances reviewed in Re Blagdon Cemetery are not exhaustive. Even if the facts do fit one or more of those categories, discretion remains to be exercised as to whether in a particular case the facts justify exhumation. In this case the creation of the new cemetery was not so exceptional as to justify exhumation from a plot that was perfectly suitable and where the mother could also be buried. [Catherine Shelley]