St Paul's Cross Stone in Todmorden (1)

Searching for Hiley graves

There are Hileys and Highleys buried in many of the graveyards of churches in Calderdale. At the church of St Paul's Cross Stone in Todmorden there are nine Hiley/Highley graves. 

                                       

There has been a church here since about 1450 and it was built as a Chapel of Ease for Heptonstall Parish to serve the townships of Stansfield and Langfield. It is built high up on the hills above the Todmorden valley, with wonderful views over the surrounding countryside. No way up to it is easy and it must have been quite a task to get a coffin up there on a snowy day in winter. It wouldn't have been very pleasant for the mourners either, who would probably have had to walk to the graveyard.

(From the Todmorden and Walsden website. Included with the permission of Linda Briggs)

St Paul Cross Stone
(Stoodley Pike in the distance)
Photo: Derrick Kershaw

The church was closed for worship in 1978 after it was declared unsafe. Later it was converted to a private house.

Cross Stone's 'New' graveyard has 4136 headstones identified covering 12568 different people. Unless a graveyard is very small it is useless to visit one and hope to be able to wander around and find a particular grave, or graves, of interest. A record of the people buried there with grave references and a plan of the graveyard are essential!

Calderdale Family History Society has produced records of the monumental inscriptions of all the Calderdale graveyards with grave references and transcriptions of the gravestones. A search of the Cross Stone records revealed nine graves where Hileys/Highleys are mentioned.

Below is a plan of the graveyard with some additional notes of my own. It shows the rows from A to Z, AA to ZZ and 1 to 21. Graves are numbered in each row from top to bottom. The Xs indicate rough positions of the Hiley/Highley graves.

The photo below is taken from Google Earth and shows the 'New' graveyard. Cross Stone Road is at the bottom of the picture and the church is just out of the picture in the bottom left hand corner. 

The red dots show the approximate locations of the Hiley graves, using the grave references and the plan above.

The aim was to take the grave reference number, identify the relevant row by referring to the plan, checking the first few names at the top or bottom of the row from the Calderdale FHS records to check the correct row had been selected, and then count down or up from one end of the row until the Hiley grave was found.

Coming shortly: The Hiley graves at Cross Stone