A Baby Burial Ground

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 26 Jun 2022

This is an area of the new Almondell Cemetery, at the East end of East Calder, reserved for, as far as I can gather, miscarried and stillborn babies. The bench in the picture was donated by a charity called Sands, which stands for 'Stillborn And Neonatal DeathS' I think, or at least something very similar. The reason I think it must also cover miscarriages is that their online guidance talks about ashes from very young unborn babies - for some reason 17 weeks is a cut-off point, presumably because on average bones don't become bones as we know them until this point. Until walking around the new cemetery today I had never really thought in depth about such things, but I'm wondering if it is a designated area due to the fact that that, officially, a person cannot be declared to be dead if they have never lived. If so, it seems to me a very good development. Whilst there were only two gravestones in this area when I visited, there were only about 40 'normal' graves in other areas, which provides a sobering remunder of how widespread this occurrence and the resulting heartache is.

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