St Mary’s Pinchbeck Conservation Project

GOD’S ACRE

St. Mary’s churchyard

“God’s Acre” is a county-wide initiative in which the church authorities co-operate with the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust to encourage parishes to use their churchyards for conservation, as a way of affirming God’s creation and our responsibility to cherish and care for it. Many churchyards, including St. Mary’s, have been isolated from the surrounding land for a long time, and consequently retain plants and animal habitats which were once plentiful in the landscape beyond their boundaries, but which now have largely vanished due to changes in land use. Churchyards have the potential to act as oases of wildlife, the importance of which can hardly be over-stressed in such an intensively cultivated area as South Holland.

Our churchyard is both a quiet place for contemplation and a refuge for wildlife. It is being managed with these two functions in mind. The area immediately around the church is kept tidy with the grass being cut regularly; there is a fine display of spring bulbs in the grass. At the east end of the church is the garden of Remembrance for the interment of ashes, a place of peace in a busy world. The churchyard is also home to a number of interesting species of trees, flowers, birds and butterflies. There are a number of fine and valuable yew trees, some of the several hundred years old.

To the east of the Garden of Remembrance an area of grass is left uncut as a wildflower meadow, and beyond that and the line of yew trees is a piece of “woodland edge” in which wildlife can flourish entirely undisturbed.