Caring for Gravestones and Memorial Inscriptions

Why Churchyard Memorials Need a Different Approach

A weathered headstone is not simply an old object. It carries a name, a date, a line of verse chosen by someone who has been gone for two centuries, and it stands in a place where families still come to look for it. It is also a piece of porous, layered, often fragile stone that has survived British weather for two hundred years or more. The urge to tidy a lichen-covered stone is entirely understandable, and almost always well meant. But the methods that make a memorial look bright next week can remove the very surface that carries the inscription.

Conservation is slower, gentler and usually cheaper than restoration. It starts from the assumption that a stone standing where it was placed is already doing something remarkable, and that our job is to help it keep doing it.

Read the Stone Before You Touch It

Stones behave in very different ways, and the same treatment that helps one can wreck another. Before any cleaning, work out what you are looking at and how it is behaving.

• Limestone and marble — calcareous and acid-sensitive. Pollution, bird droppings and some lichen acids dissolve the surface, leaving it sugary, pitted and white. Inscriptions in marble are often shallow and easily erased.
• Sandstone — often porous and laminated. It flakes and delaminates when wet, particularly where bedding planes are exposed on the face or edges.
• Slate — dense, fine-grained and usually the most obliging of churchyard stones, though it splits along cleavage lines and can be chipped at the edges.
• Granite and other igneous stone — hard and resistant, but iron fixings and lettering can stain, and polished faces show every scratch.

Notice too whether the stone is damp, whether white salt deposits are appearing, and whether there are open joints or cracks. Wet stone is weak stone. Much the safest day's work is a dry one.

Cleaning Without Harm

Start with the least aggressive option and stop as soon as you have achieved what is necessary, which is usually legibility rather than brightness.

• Water, a soft brush and patience will lift loose soil, bird droppings and general grime. Use a natural-bristle brush, work from the bottom up to avoid streaks, and rinse sparingly with clean water.
• Never use wire brushes, abrasive pads, sandblasting, steam cleaners or pressure washers. All of them remove the tooled surface and the crisp edges of the lettering.
• Avoid bleach, patio cleaners, vinegar, fairy-liquid solutions and any acid-based product. They attack calcareous stone and leave residues that keep working long after you have gone home.
• Do not scrub at flaking edges. If a scale lifts, leave it; it is holding the surface together.
• Do not clean what you cannot reach safely. A wobbly step ladder against a table tomb is a poor trade for a tidy inscription.

Anything more than light cleaning — stain removal, biocide, consolidation, relettering — is a job for an accredited conservator or a stonemason with conservation experience.

Leaning, Sinking and Unstable Memorials

A lean is rarely the fault of the stone. It is usually a symptom: settlement of the base, soil erosion around the plinth, root action, poor drainage, or a rusted iron dowel that has swollen and cracked the joint.

Please do not pull a memorial upright or bed it in concrete. Concrete is rigid and impermeable; it traps moisture, frost-lifts and frequently snaps the stone at the ground line. Traditional practice uses a soft, free-draining base of compacted gravel with a lime-based mortar, or a discreet stainless fixing, set so that water can escape.

Where a stone is genuinely unstable, safety comes first — cordon it off and report it to the churchwarden the same day. And take care with strimmers: cord trimmers chip edges and wipe out shallow lettering in seconds. Cut vegetation back by hand near any stone.

Lichens, Moss and the Case for Restraint

Many of our churchyards are among the richest lichen habitats left in lowland Britain. Some species are slow-growing, pollution-sensitive and nationally scarce, and a few are older than the headstone they sit on. Blanket removal is rarely justified on conservation grounds and can be damaging in its own right.

That said, growth does sometimes obscure an inscription. Where that happens, treat it locally rather than wholesale: brush gently when the stone is dry, or ask a conservator about a targeted, approved treatment. Most lichens on slate and granite are superficial. On limestone and marble, a few crustose species can contribute to surface loss, which is one more reason not to scrub them off with anything abrasive and take the stone's skin away with them.

Recording Inscriptions and Working Through Permission

Recording is conservation. Photograph the memorial before anything else, in raking light — early morning or late afternoon — from both faces, straight on and from an angle, with a scale in shot. For worn lettering, raking-light images, a foil squeeze or a careful record sheet will often reveal more than the eye. Keep any rubbing to sound, dry stone, and never rub marble, painted surfaces or anything already flaking.

Permission matters. In most of Britain, memorials in consecrated ground fall under faculty jurisdiction. Speak first to the incumbent or churchwarden, then to your diocesan advisory committee before any work beyond routine clearance. Anything that might disturb buried remains, or that affects a listed structure, needs consent. Work in pairs, wear gloves, cover cuts, and be aware of tetanus.

Do all of that, and a churchyard stays what it is: a quiet archive of local lives, legible to the next generation because we chose restraint over shine.