Great effort by volunteers to transform sacred place

The Friends of Padiham Cemetery, formed a year ago, has made great progress in brightening up the graveyard which had become unsightly and unsafe over the years.

Mrs Dot Calvert, secretary of the group, said: “Since the group started out last year we have made a lot of progress.

“We had a number of local businesses donate tools to help us in our work and we also raised some money on crowd funding and at last year’s Party in the Park.

“We planted some daffodil bulbs at the entrance to the cemetery, sighted a number of bird boxes and recently planted winter pansies in the remembrance wall.

“All this was made possible by kind donations from local businesses and organisations.

“This year, we have managed to keep on top of the grass cutting with the help of the community payback team and our volunteers.

“We have also been lucky enough to have lots of topsoil donated by Burnley Football Club for free and we have been busy distributing this around the cemetery over the last couple of weeks.

“We are using the topsoil to level out some of the older graves that have sunk so that this will make it easier to mow the grass next year.

“A small number of volunteers have been doing this and we are hoping to get some more delivered soon, it would be great if we could generate some help to distribute this.

“We will be holding a coffee morning at St Leonard’s Church in the new year in order to raise awareness, generate funding and hopefully more volunteers.”

If anyone would like to support the group by volunteering their time or by donating anything they think might help they can email [email protected].