Where Am I? No.39 - Quirky little chapel

[DavidG02]

Just a warning . Don't type in whitewash bell tower . You will need these 

[DavidG02]

St Nicholas Freefolk Hampshire

?

No. Tower is a little off .

[groom]

Similar, but has a door instead of a window and no lower part at the back.

[sugarbakers]

They don't look like new graves to me though - too much vegetation.

Agreed.  Looks odd to me to see a fence separating the chapel from the graves ... why would they do that ?

Maybe those graves have nothing to do with that chapel.

[Rhododendron]

As someone has commented, interesting to see so many wooden crosses all together.  Some burials of people in a disaster e.g. shipwreck??? where names were no known.

[groom]

The fence could be to keep animals out of the graveyard. It's a very odd one though, the fact that there aren't any "proper" headstones and I can't see any that have names on them.

[Trishanne]

I haven't found it but.....
There is a little island off the coast of Tenby in Wales, called Caldey island. There used to be a Cistercian monastery on it.  The little church, St Davids, has a churchyard with wooden crosses marking the graves of monks. Unfortunately it is not the right church, but it got me wondering if we were looking at monks graves. I haven't been able to find them yet though.
Pat

[cazza59]

There are some very interesting observations about this little chapel.   It could well be European.  Also I like suggestions that it could  have been mass burials for either a disaster or epidemic of some kind. At least with the wooden crosses, it makes a change from pauper's unmarked graves which was the norm in these cases.  Perhaps a mining disaster and the burials were paid for the mine (unlikely from everything I've read, but you never know).  If these had been graves of the well off, then you could be forgiven for thinking the crosses would have been replaced with stone.

[roopat]

I even wondered if they were war graves before the official cemeteries were developed, which obviously didn't happen straightaway after the war ended , thus leading to the overgrown look. So in that case presumably France or Belgium. But the church itself looks well-kept compared to this part of the graveyard