The reason for the problem is easily identifiable, resulting from the number of bodies that have buried during the Abbey’s long and colourful history. It is estimated that up to 6,000 bodies have been "jammed in" to shallow graves under the church's grave ledger stones, and the Abbey has discovered "huge great voids everywhere" beneath its flooring.
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| Bath Abbey's History Is Catching Up On It |
With three different buildings having occupied the site since the early 1500’s alone, the number of people buried under the building can be counted in thousands.
"There were burials here all the way through to about 1840," said Mr Curnook. "But at that point the place was full and they opened the Victorian cemetery at Ralph Allen Drive and stopped burying people here.
"I've had lots of estimates of how many bodies are buried here, but somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000, but they just jammed them in and jammed them in - it would have been very unpleasant to put it mildly."
Investigative works undertaken at the beginning of 2011 and 2012 uncovered the effect the bodies were having on the long-term stability of the building.
"We were looking for the foundation walls of the Norman cathedral on which we could lay a new floor," said Mr Curnook. "But we didn't find any - what we found instead were huge great voids underground in every place. “When we went in underneath one of the medieval pillars there was fresh air underneath it, at which point we stopped work."
The Victorian history of the Abbey, particularly the period under the stewardship of Sir George Scott’s transformation of the interior of the building in 1864 to 1874, revealed that our Victorian ancestors were aware of the problem, but appeared to try and resolve it in the "most shocking" way, according to Mr Curnook.
"They basically churned up the graves that were there and broke them up to try and consolidate the floor," he said. "They were very much more robust than we are - the burials had not been in the ground for more than 30 or 40 years."
Now, the lifting every bit of furniture in the place as well as its huge grave ledger stones is part of the ambitious £18m Footprint project, which includes the installation of new under-floor heating which taps into the city's hot springs.
"We're going through the earth where there are burials but we're not going anywhere near any intact burials but obviously we are finding human remains," said Mr Curnook. "Wherever there are voids found we'll be pouring grouting into them to fill the floor up to stabilise it. We'll then bring the same earth back in again and any human remains we've found we'll carefully reinter those bones and say a prayer over them."
Already more than 10 cardboard boxes of human remains have been carefully put to one side, ready to be returned along with bits of coffin handles, inscribed plaques and lead-coffin lining. But, according to Kim Watkins, the archaeological consultant on the project, it is only disturbed graves that they are uncovering, with mainly adult bones dating from the early 1800s.
"The conditions here aren't good for the preservation of anything but there's no jewellery or coins unless they removed them in the 19th Century," she said. "But it's the extent of the disturbance by the Victorians that more than anything has surprised me and unfortunately it's more the destruction that's a surprise than what has actually survived."
http://www.bathabbey.org/
http://www.bathabbey.org/footprint
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