Operated by East Boldre Community Stores Limited.
Community Benefit Society, number 8481
Graveyard Plan
There is no visible trace of the 480+ graves onsite, save for one tomb and 54 headstones tucked in an overgrown corner of the site. These were removed to the rear boundary of the chapel site by the Baptist Church prior to the hall being built in the early 1990s.
The plan here shows the positions of the gravestones on the site circa 1990 before the gravestones were moved. It indicates that the graves were laid out in uniform lines across the chapel site. The numbered plan shows their original positions but unfortunately the list linking the numbers to individual graves was lost many years ago.
We found an excerpt of the list included in the deeds for the chapel that revealed the original positions of 13 of the headstones. This was a single page from the church's correspondence with the Home Office to gain their permission prior to building the hall on the graveyard in the 1990s . Unfortunately, the Home Office did not archive the full correspondence so the rest of the list appears to have been lost.
Until1889 the burial ground was rectangular, but was almost filled. Following a vote by the church's members, it was extended across the bottoms of the gardens of the two neighbouring cottages which the church had owned since 1835. This gave rise to the irregular shape of the existing site and most of the more recent graves will therefore in the dog leg section.
Archaeological evidence
During the groundworks to demolish the church hall and create the shop's car park, Wessex Archaeology were onsite to record any archaeology unearthed and to ensure any human remains disturbed were dealt with legally and respectfully. Thankfully, none of the 500+ burials onsite were disturbed but 6 grave cuts were revealed during the shallow excavations for the car park foundations.
The grave cuts are hard to make out to the untrained eye but the back fill material from when the graves were original filled in showed up as a subtly different colour to the undisturbed surrounding soil. They are shown edged in blue in the photograph right.
This shows there was a row of graves closer to the original path, none of which appear to have had headstones.
Graveyard Interpretation
With our award from the National Lottery Heritage fund we have installed two interpretation panels in the graveyard
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One commemorates the people that we know are buried there, most of whom have no headstone. We hope this serves to both commemorate their lives and as a reminder that the shop's garden is a graveyard.
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The other engages local people and visitors with the site's heritage drawing upon the information presented on this page.
