Start With Respect and Permission

Churchyards are working places of worship as well as historic landscapes, and many are still in active use. Before you begin recording anything, check whether you need permission. In the Church of England, faculties and churchyard regulations apply, and some sites are scheduled monuments or lie within conservation areas. A polite word with the parish office, churchwarden or incumbent will usually settle the matter and often brings useful local knowledge with it. If the churchyard is closed to new burials, it may still be consecrated ground, so the same care applies.

Take nothing but photographs and notes. Never lift a stone, scrape lichen, apply chalk, flour or shaving foam to bring up lettering, or prise at loose fragments. These techniques, once common among well-meaning recorders, cause real and permanent damage. A soft brush may be used on fallen debris only if the stone is sound, and even then it is often better to leave it alone.

Materials Tell You a Lot

Stone choice is one of the readiest clues to date. Before the mid-seventeenth century, most memorials were plain slabs of local stone, often limestone or sandstone, laid flat or set low. Upright headstones become common in the later 1600s and especially the 1700s.

• Slate — favoured in Wales, the Lake District, Cornwall and parts of the Midlands from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. It takes crisp lettering that survives beautifully, and often looks almost new after three hundred years.
• Limestone and sandstone — widely used, but prone to delamination and the loss of lettering. Many eighteenth-century inscriptions are now unreadable.
• Marble — fashionable from the late eighteenth century onwards, especially for chest tombs and tablets inside churches. Bright white when new, it turns grey and develops a sugared surface outdoors.
• Granite — rare before the 1850s, then dominant once the railways made transport cheap. Polished granite is almost always Victorian or later.
• Cast iron and zinc — occasional from the 1840s to the early 1900s, often as crosses or kerb sets.

A change of material across a churchyard is often a change of century. A run of slate headstones giving way to granite usually marks the mid- to late nineteenth century.

Reading the Lettering and Decoration

Lettering style is a reliable guide and a pleasure to study. Early monuments use roman capitals with a slightly irregular hand. By the eighteenth century you see elegant roundhand script, often with flourishes and swags of foliage. Victorian cutters favoured sharper, more uniform lettering with serif faces, and later in the century gothic and ecclesiastical styles appear.

Symbolism carries its own chronology. Skulls, hourglasses and winged souls are typical of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries — memento mori imagery, not morbidity. Urns, weeping willows, broken columns and open books belong to the later Georgian and Victorian periods. Crosses, angels and Gothic tracery swell after the 1840s as the Oxford Movement reshaped church taste. Kerbs, vases and lettering in gold or lead-filled paint are almost all twentieth-century developments.

Record Inscriptions Without Touching

The safest method is the simplest. Photograph the whole stone in soft, raking light — early morning or late afternoon is ideal — then take a close frame of the inscription. Low sun casts shadows that make worn lettering legible on your screen even when your eyes miss it on site.

• Note the stone's position, orientation and relationship to neighbouring memorials.
• Record the exact wording, including spelling oddities. "Died" and "Buried" may give different dates, and both are useful.
• Transcribe figures carefully: 7 and 1, 3 and 8, and 5 and 6 are easily confused when worn.
• Use a torch at a shallow angle, not a wet sponge, to reveal faint carving.
• Write down the condition of the stone, so future recorders can see change over time.

If the stone has fallen, do not stand it up. Tipping and re-setting memorials can break them and disturb buried remains. Record it where it lies.

Using Dates With Caution

An inscription date is a terminus, not a birth certificate. Stones were often erected years after a death, especially when families saved for a good monument. A date of death is more reliable than a date of birth, which may be calculated roughly from an age at death. Watch for stones carved by a mason in a workshop and delivered long afterwards, and for later inscriptions added beneath an earlier one to record a widow or child.

Where an inscription seems improbable, the parish register or bishop's transcript may help. Churchyards and record offices often sit side by side in research terms, and a gravestone plus a burial entry can confirm each other neatly.

Leave the Place as You Found It

Walk on paths where you can, avoid trampling low kerbs and planting, and keep away from leaning stones and unstable chest tombs. Ivy and tree roots do harm, but so does inexpert clearance. Report any stone you believe is dangerous to the churchwarden rather than attempting to stabilise it yourself.

Dating a gravestone is a slow, gentle craft. Look at the stone, the lettering, the symbols and the company it keeps, and the churchyard will quietly tell you its story — provided you leave it exactly where it stands.