Looking around, this doesn’t appear to be a cemetery. There are no gravestones or plastic-wrapped flowers, walls locking us in and gargoyles lurking above. Instead, tree sprouts clutter the ground, wild plants consume the graves, there are open fields on the horizon and a bird of prey, a red kite, floats above me, scouting for mice and other critters.
It’s a crisp winter’s morning in rural Essex and Delyse Jackaman, the manager of Old Park Meadow, tells me I haven’t picked the best time of year to come. Usually, she says, flowers fill the plain ground around us. What I do see, however, are small five- to six-foot bulges of grass dotting the fields—graves. We’re walking across a natural burial ground.
Natural burials are part of the rising trend for green or eco-funerals—placing the natural world at the heart of the postmortem process. “Eighty per cent of people will get a formulaic cremation,” Rosie Inman-Cook, the manager of the Natural Death Centre charity, tells me over the phone. Instead of the CO2-emitting cremation, a green funeral “is where you’re considering what happens to the carbon in your body, at a place that’s going to be planting trees and protecting it as a space for wildlife in the future”.
The first natural burial site in the world was set up in the UK in 1993. Now the British countryside boasts over 360. The locations vary: forests, fields, farms, meadows and coastal trails. But what unites these sites is a commitment to nature and its preservation. Green funerals seek to return the body to the natural world, leaving the local wildlife unaltered and unharmed. “We’re not a crematorium or a churchyard or anything like that” Jackaman explains. “We are creating a nature reserve here.”
Natural burials prioritise not damaging the surrounding habitat. Metal and plastic coffins are rejected for biodegradable materials, such as woven willow coffins or linen shrouds. Tree saplings can be planted as a natural alternative to a headstone.
The burial site is also free of what Jackaman refers to as “grief litter”—“wind chimes or solar lights”, essentially any man-made objects. At Old Park Meadow, small wooden placards mark the name of each grave and a few benches are dotted around. Otherwise, the wildlife remains wild.
Since opening in 2017, Old Park Meadow has hosted over 600 burials on its 34-acre plot. It also often provides a funeral and wake service in a modern-looking building behind the fields. While the site I am at today appears to veer more towards the luxury side of natural burials, the services are typically much cheaper than a standard cemetery burial or cremation.
Natural burials hold obvious environmental benefits. But they also can be personally comforting to the bereaved, Jackaman says.
Friends and family can enjoy the natural world when visiting their deceased, surrounded by the “birds and the insects and the bugs and the wildlife”. Inman-Cook agrees. “It’s a far better outcome if they’ve got somewhere beautiful to visit, and it’s a positive living legacy. So planting a tree, supporting wildlife… It’s a positive thing, something that you can hold on to.”
Of course, the soon-to-be deceased might find comfort knowing they will return to the natural world, slowly reintegrating into wildlife.
While we walk past some freshly hand-dug graves, Jackaman tells me an eclectic mix of people opt for the service. They aim to provide whatever the family wants. “So long as it’s legal, we try to make sure that we can let them have whatever kind of funeral.” This has resulted in a double-decker bus being used as a hearse, live singers and meditative sound bowls to punctuate the silence, and one service that was simply an afternoon tea. “Every funeral is different,” she says.
As my tour of the grounds comes to a close, I ask Jackaman if she’d like to be buried this way when her time comes. “Definitely,” she responds without hesitation. Having spent the afternoon here, I think a natural burial may be the way I’d like to go too.
