nova scotia | Spade & the Grave

If you read my last post, then you know there are some interesting things going on at the Old Parish Burying Ground in Windsor, Nova Scotia. Among the not so ideal stone repairs, there are some spectacular gravestones at that site and I highly recommend you check it out if you’re in the area! There is work by ‘JW’ who signed their initials bigger than the name of the person dedicated on the gravestones, and some earlier sandstone markers from the 18th century with classic memento mori imagery including skulls, bones, and hour glasses. Your time is fleeting, etc!

The monuments I want to write about today though are unlike anything I’d ever seen before! When we rolled up to the burial ground and saw them, my first thought was that we were witnessing the world’s weirdest gravestone repair, somehow broken off halfway up and mounted high over the grass on posts…but then we took a closer look…

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This past weekend, myself and my husband traveled over to Windsor, Nova Scotia, to visit our friends and tour around a couple of the local burial grounds…because what else would we be doing on the weekend? We’d been informed that some conservation efforts had been undertaken at the oldest site in the town, the Old Parish Burying Ground, and based on the photos there was some concern over how that conservation had been carried out. So we wanted to document what we could, and see the amazing gravestones as well (There will be a follow up post on what we found, because it’s very exciting!).

The Old Parish Burying Ground was opened in 1776 according to the sign at the front of the site. The Canada’s Historic Places page (Click HERE) gives some confusing dates and, I think, a typo at the beginning of the page claiming the land was given to the church in 1779, but lists the opening date as 1776. It was the site of the first Anglican Church in Windsor, but the site itself was not consecrated until 1826, by Right Reverend John Inglis. This was a common occurrence in Newfoundland and Labrador, when Bishop Inglis would travel to outports for services and consecration of sites. His name appears a lot in records of NL burial sites, so it was very familiar to come across his name here too!

Content warning: Upsetting gravestone repairs using incompatible materials