Graveyard walk and talk

Many of you - if the turnout for Bexhill Museum's guided walk around the cemetary on Turkey Road was anything to go by.

Leaders Gillian Beecher and Heather Morrey were delighted with the public's response to the event.

Gillian said: "It's fantastic. We are surprised, but then we get more at the weekend walks than we do for the weekday walks. But people are interested in local history - I think that's it."

The group set off on a sunny but blustery day in search of the great and the good, looking around gravestones of emminent people as well as much-loved local characters.

Members of the parish history group attached to the Museum pointed walkers in the right direction then talked about the person or particular points of interest.

They started looking at the grave of Charles Catt, a farrier, then Joseph Fairhurst, Archibald George Luxton, and Stephen Carey, who originally laid out the cemetary.

They then discovered characters as diverse as George Head, whose tombstone was a tall pillar with a motorcycle helmet on top, Sir Gordon Guggisberg, and George Davis, whose tomb was decorated with a steam traction engine.

They found the resting place of the first person buried in Bexhill Cemetary, Elizabeth Winborn, and that of Henry Le Mesurier Dunn who owned the Manor House in Old Town before the First World War.

The grave of William Groat has a coach horn on the stone, while Frederick James Burton had an Indian club on his, and Sydney Wise a statue of a fireman - the young firefighter was killed while doing his job.

Other points of interest included finding the site of the Isolation Hospital, always built next to a cemetary, and the tombstones of celebrated citizens such as artist Albert Goodwin, Theodosia Burrows who founded Ancaster House School, and Florence King, the oldest occupant of the graveyard.

Other guided walk leaders were Carol Sargent, Neil and Ann Bates and Judith Carey.