Home / UK Cemeteries / Yorkshire / St Mary's (Scarborough) [12]

St Mary's dates to about 1150, although it resides on land where an earlier church from approximately 1000AD once stood. It is situated in the historic Yorkshire seacoast town of Scarborough, just down the hill from Scarborough Castle, which was built on the site of a Roman signal station in the 1130's. The church was heavily damaged in the English Civil War, and again when it was hit by a German parachute bomb in WW2. The zigzag pattern of the headstones was laid out by church administrators when it was decided that the churchyard itself should be opened to community events. The bodies still remain under the churchyard soil in their original plots, but the headstones were aligned to allow greater use of the land.