Fishponds churchyard

Image: © Natasha Ceridwen de Chroustchoff Taken: 15 Jul 2008

A multitude of small identical graves: I wonder if they mark the graves of the Stapleton workhouse inhabitants who used to worship here? (I cannot find confirmation of this.) Update: thanks to Hazel, who contacted me with a link to the history of Fishponds, it appears that this is indeed the case. A visitor to the church in 1847 was dismayed by the sight of the wretched workhouse children that filled the pews, and of their graves that filled the churchyard: "The churchyard seems to be almost wholly used as a Golgotha for the neighbouring poor-house, as the long ranks of little red clay-mounds, with a small inscribed footstone to each, indicated. I seldom saw a more desolate and cheerless looking resting place for the dead in my life; not a shrub or altar-tomb, that I could see, rose to vary the dismal and monotonous dreariness and flatness of the place." See http://fishponds.org.uk/fish1847.html for the rest of the contemporary account - it deserves to be read.

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