Families of people buried in graves vulnerable to coastal erosion say indecision over how to tackle the problem is causing them avoidable anguish about the final resting places of their loved ones.
North Norfolk district council (NNDC) has identified three church graveyards in the villages of Happisburgh, Trimingham, and Mundesley as being at risk of being engulfed by the sea in the coming decades.
A recent report on the issue sets out a series of options from taking no action to exhuming remains and reburying them in safer locations. The council and the Church of England say it is for local people to decide how to proceed.
However, a lack of consensus over when and how to tackle the problem has left bereaved families frustrated and anxious.
Frank Mason, 69, whose parents, Ethel and Fred, are buried in Happisburgh, said: “At moment we’re in limbo. It upsets me. My parents wanted this to their final resting place, but it isn’t going to be because of the sea.”
Projections suggest at least part of the churchyard could fall into the sea in the next 80 years, but Mason fears it will happen much sooner. “I think it’s got less than 20 years, if you look at what’s happened in the last 30 years,” he said.
Mason, a Happisburgh farmer like many of his ancestors, said: “I would like to see my parents moved before I pass away. It’s unsettling but no one listens.”
View of the graveyard and the receding coastline from the tower of St Mary the Virgin church, in Happisburgh, Norfolk. Photograph: Joshua Bright/The Guardian
Mason suggested relocating the graves to land beside a water tower – the highest point in the village – and thinks the church should pay for the move.
Sarah Greenwood accepts that her grandparents’ graves at Happisburgh will have to be relocated but says the time has not yet come. She argues that the immediacy of the threat has been exaggerated in the local press.
“It is very emotive – it made me ill over the summer,” she said. “The council’s report was really good, but now there’s uncertainty about how it is taken forward. And everybody is washing their hands over who is responsible.”
She wants the council to build more sea defences to slow the inevitable erosion and to allow burials to continue at the graveyards for now.
Greenwood, who runs a packing business, recalled a school trip to the neighbouring village of Eccles, which has almost entirely disappeared into the sea, including its church and graveyard.
“You could see people’s bones,” she said. “Some have this romantic idea that people’s remains will just get washed out to sea. They won’t. People will take bones as souvenirs and go grave robbing looking for valuables. It’s completely undignified.
“They will have to be moved – but not yet. We want soft defences first.”
Mason is also haunted by what happened at Eccles. “I’m worried that the same thing that happened at Eccles will happen at Happisburgh and there’ll be skeletons on the beach. I’d be disgusted by that,” he said.
Nine miles up the coast at Trimingham lies the grave of the former paratrooper Nicholas Crouch, who was killed in 2010 in Mosul, Iraq, while working as a close protection officer.
His mother, Barbara Crouch, a retired teacher, said she could not sleep after learning that her son’s grave might one day be moved. She added: “It does disturb me to think this won’t be his permanent resting place. For us it’s an important place to go.”
Each year, on the anniversary of Nicholas’s death, the Crouch family gather at his grave. Crouch believes new burials should stop but says it is too soon to exhume existing graves. She said: “My preference for now is to do nothing and closely monitor it, but an early decision needs to be made when a tipping point has been reached.”
In the meantime, she said bereaved families should be consulted and a that timetable for decisions set out. “It ought to be settled, because I was temporarily deeply unsettled by it,” she said. “I hope it doesn’t get lost in the talking. The important thing for me is to get on with it.”
When the tipping point is reached, Crouch says she would favour a mass exhumation. “It would be more bearable to do it together,” she said. “We might all want to be there when they break ground but won’t want to ghoulishly watch the whole procedure.”
Rob Goodliffe, a coastal transition manager at NNDC, said the graveyards were owned and managed by the diocese of Norwich. He said: “Ultimately it is down to them to decide the direction to take. We are here to help support them through that process with communities.”
He confirmed a range of options were under consideration, including stopping burials and reburying at least parts of the vulnerable churchyards, but said there was time to weigh all the options. “We are talking decades before it starts to be lost,” he added.
Graham Usher, the bishop of Norwich, said: “There is no common view on what should happen yet. We need good local conversations to the find the right solutions for each community.”
He said the prospect of losing the churches and graveyards was one of “immense sadness for the local community, but the Christian church believes in resurrection. We believe there is life after death.”
