Natural Burial

Landscape, Practice and Experience

Andy Clayden, Trish Green, Jenny Hockey, Mark Powell

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317676157
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Architektur
• Thema: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

This book unravels the many different experiences, meanings and realities of natural burial. Twenty years after the first natural burial ground opened there is an opportunity to reflect on how a concept for a very different approach to caring for our dead has become a reality: new providers, new landscapes and a hybrid of new and traditional rituals. In this short time the natural burial movement has flourished. In the UK there are more than 200 sites, and the concept has travelled to North America, Holland, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

This survey of natural burials draws on interviews with those involved in the natural burial process – including burial ground managers, celebrants, priests, bereaved family, funeral directors – providing a variety of viewpoints on the concept as a philosophy and landscape practice. Site surveys, design plans and case studies illustrate the challenges involved in creating a natural burial site, and a key longitudinal case study of a single site investigates the evolving nature of the practice.

Natural Burial is the first book on this subject to bring together all the groups and individuals involved in the practice, explaining the facts behind this type of burial and exploring a topic which is attracting significant media interest and an upsurge of sites internationally.

1

Introduction

The four authors of this book have worked together on natural burial since 2007. Andy Clayden, a landscape architect engaged in teaching, research and practice, has been somewhat outnumbered by the anthropologists and sociologists in the team he has led: Trish Green, Jenny Hockey and Mark Powell. The diversity of our backgrounds has made for some challenging discussions within which all four of us have revisited our assumptions about the character of the world – and learned an awful lot from one another. While ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ had previously been self-evident categories for Andy, as a landscape architect, for the social scientists accustomed mainly to text-based work among small populations, the materially grounded qualities of landscape design, as well as the scope of geographic information system (GIS) surveys, represented new terrain. Our joint work therefore utilises concepts and methods we developed while working together in an interdisciplinary fashion.

As this chapter describes, the team’s distinctive mix of approaches is reflected in the account of burying naturally that we provide. Here is an opportunity to enter and re-enter the natural burial ground from the perspective of: someone choosing and paying for their own gravesite; the members of a funeral party; bereaved people whose friend or relative is interred there; a site owner or manager; someone who labours there, perhaps digging graves or cutting back vegetation; and a priest or officiant, a funeral director, or simply a member of the local community. What intrigues us about natural burial, as both site and practice, is its mix of tradition and innovation, its openness to diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations. As such it is truly a ‘contested site’. Questions our research have uncovered include: what is ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’? Should a burial site be ‘sacred’ and can a farmer’s field acquire this status? Is burial ‘in perpetuity’ a human right? And might death become forgotten if quietly folded away into the landscape? Natural burial, then, not only resonates with many traditional views of landscape and nature, from high art to ploughing, but also challenges some established mortuary practices.

Chapter 2 describes natural burial’s recent history in some detail. Here we set the scene by explaining what we understand by natural burial – as a concept, a site and a practice – and how it has developed in the UK over the last 20 years. With Andy Clayden’s long-standing interest in cemetery design,¹ creating spaces for a different approach to burial gave us an important starting point. Here we cite Carlisle municipal cemetery – described more fully in Chapter 2 – where the manager and registrar, Ken West, encountered two single women with concerns about the legacy of traditional burial.² Without descendents to tend their graves, they wanted a simple plot to contain their bodies, without the paraphernalia of headstone, curtilage and hothoused flowers. They also had concerns about the natural environment, wanting their remains to disappear into a nourished landscape. When combined with Ken West’s career history, these imperatives proved fertile. Although trained in a more environmentally sensitive approach to landscape maintenance in the 1960s, for Ken cemetery management had become a chemical-based containment of nature by the 1980s, one that left him feeling disillusioned. In 1993, as a result, part of Carlisle municipal cemetery was set aside as a ‘natural burial ground’ where trees alone marked the graves. As we explain, this single-site development occurred at a time when a broader range of environmental concerns were capturing the public’s imagination and indeed government and policy agendas (see, for example, HC91-1, 2000–01³).

Over 200 other natural burial grounds materialised in the next two decades – and we recorded their profiles in a GIS survey.⁴ Despite this proliferation, however, natural burial has yet to take over from established disposal practices, such as whole-body burial in a churchyard, municipal or private cemetery, or cremation followed by the disposal of ashes either at the crematorium or in a site of survivors’ choosing. While national figures for burying naturally are not recorded, we have been able to estimate that by 2007 the practice accounted for approximately 1 per cent of the total number of burials and cremations (see Chapter 2). One of our first research questions therefore concerned public awareness of natural burial. Even its name was confusing: green burial, woodland burial, natural burial? To find out more about public perceptions we invited people to participate in one of three focus groups following a minibus trip to an undisclosed location: a natural burial ground local to Sheffield.⁵ For ethical reasons we informed them we were visiting some kind of burial ground before they boarded the bus. This meant that everyone who came on the trip – as they all did – were entering the natural burial landscape without the recent benefit of Google or a chat with a neighbour. We wanted to know how people for whom death was not pressing would understand that landscape. Their responses were mixed, particularly the diversity of their understandings of what was ‘natural’. Striking among these early findings was evidence that (a) some participants were heartily relieved to find a burial space where the Church could not ‘breathe down your neck’ and (b) the distribution of ephemeral memorabilia across the burial field struck some as ‘tatty’, a scattering of ‘bling’ uncontained by grave curtilages.

Our sample was small, albeit representative of women and men, plus a spectrum of ages. And they were visiting one particular natural burial ground. As Andy Clayden already knew, it was not typical because there is no typical natural burial ground. Visiting another 20 sites throughout the UK was therefore our next priority: from farmers’ fields to dedicated space in municipal cemeteries to large-scale commercial ventures (see Chapter 3).⁶ Interviews with owners or managers were coupled with tours of the sites that included taking photographs and subsequently making drawings. Yielding a considerable body of data, site visits revealed the diversity of owners’ and managers’ previous experiences, motivations, design strategies, degrees of involvement with families and local communities and levels of environmental concern. Some had sought out suitable land; some already owned it. Some were burying into established woodland and meadows; others were concerned to generate and sustain new environments.

The variety of orientations towards establishing a site was compounded by the diversity of mortuary and memorialising practices owners and managers supported, discouraged or refused. But asking them about their aspirations and their regulations did not necessarily reveal what happened in practice, nor its longer-term cultural, social and emotional implications for immediately bereaved people and the local community or for the practices of clergy, humanist and alternative officiants, and funeral directors. To understand more about their embodied experiences, we chose four sites which represented some of the broad divisions that we knew were out there: a municipal cemetery with a dedicated natural burial area; a field set aside on a farm; a burial ground within a sustainability centre and a site established by a funeral director in a field purchased for this purpose. Extensive, semi-structured interviews with whoever owned, managed and worked at the site were combined with similar work among people who had preregistered for a grave, had buried someone at the site or had been involved with the site in a professional capacity and, more briefly, with whoever lived locally to the site. Having people talk to us in this way evoked memory and reflection, storytelling, emotional disclosure and humour. But while we visited people at home – and were often shown photographs and other memory objects related to the dead – the physical and social world of the natural burial ground itself remained more distant than we wanted. We therefore used participant observation, traditional to anthropological research, and helped dig graves, clear vegetation and give support at funerals at two of the four sites chosen (see Chapter 5).

As you read on, therefore, you will find very different points of entry into the topic – and indeed into the natural burial ground. Depending upon the research method used to gather particular data, the ‘voice’ you hear within the book shifts, from the whole team’s authorial firstperson plural to the first person singular of Andy Clayden’s longitudinal observational study. In the latter case, the perspective of a single team member is the vehicle through which the life of the natural burial ground has been explored through repeated visits and photographic surveys over a period that is now in its fifth year (see Chapter 8). Counter to the myth that natural burial is a cheap option espoused by an alternative fringe of hippies and tree-huggers, our research testifies to the diversity of people who have chosen or become involved in this practice. Not only those who provide and manage the sites, but also those who bury or work there, share a variety of belief systems and values – from orthodox Christianity to Druidism – and they include policemen, market gardeners, bikers, artists, soldiers, professional photographers and businessmen.

Digging deeper

What this chapter has described so far is the gathering of information in limited public circulation. Even if someone has buried a relative or friend at a natural burial site, their experience is likely to be highly context-specific. So our data provide a broad outline of sites offering natural burial throughout the UK,⁷ along with insights into the lived experience of burying naturally and its aftermath. This does not, however, explain how natural burial came to develop when it did. What made it ‘catch on’? What is its appeal? And what might its contribution be to a future where disposal of the dead represents a national problem (HC91-1, 2000–01⁸), with concern at government level about dwindling burial space; political and public reticence over grave reuse; and costly measures required to manage the environmental dangers of cremation?

Here our mix of disciplinary backgrounds provides the foundation for responding to questions of this kind; expertise relating to land management and the designed environment plus the theoretical and methodological resources of two disciplines that contribute much to our understanding of human societies and cultures. Natural burial is a collective practice where individuals draw on existing repertoires of belief and practice, acting upon them – or not – within social contexts where people and their physical environments come together. While social policy, business studies and the psychology of bereavement may give us part of the story, what we offer here is an understanding of human experience within that much bigger setting of its history, its landscapes and an ultimately shared social encounter with human mortality. How do particular environments shape what happens after a life has ended? And does burying into such landscapes inevitably change them? To address these questions, we drew on a proliferating Death Studies literature to find out whether what we were hearing about and observing was:

1 … a creative resistance to modernist disposal and memorialisation?

Many authors have argued that death has been sequestered – or removed – to hospitals, residential homes, funeral parlours and cemeteries.⁹ This means that individuals can feel distanced from relatives and friends who are dying or are recently dead, with little experience or expertise to contribute to their care or remembrance. Natural burial, by contrast, has been aligned with the Natural Death Movement¹⁰ and DIY funerals¹¹ where people close to the deceased somehow take charge of their body, perhaps dressing it, decorating their coffin and providing transportation to a ceremony at which they themselves officiate.

2 … an aspect of the re-enchantment of death?

In contrast with the rational principles underlying institutional care of people who are dying or dead, a raft of new practices have humanised some aspects of death and dying by giving more space to the imagination and to emotional experience: the Hospice Movement that provides palliative rather than curative care for dying people, partly by involving relatives and friends;¹² the Natural Death Centre that promotes openness about death and dying;¹³ the new legitimacy of informal wayside¹⁴ and burial gr...