Why have home burials come back from the dead?

We’re all familiar with home births but what of home deaths? Among the British aristocracy it’s long been de rigueur (mortis?) to bury family on country estates. Diana, Princess of Wales, was laid to rest at Althorp Park, Northamptonshire, on an island in the Oval Lake.

Traditionally, whole bodies were interred at stately seats, although in the case of Sir Henry Norris, executed on Tower Hill in 1536, only his head is buried at his family home, Ockwells Manor in Berkshire.

To Thomas Gray, death may have been the great leveller — “The paths of glory lead but to the grave” — but the grand mausoleums of wealthy families suggest otherwise. At one elegantly understated example in Lincolnshire’s Brocklesby Park, built by the 1st Baron Yarborough for his late wife Sophia Pelham, she sleeps encircled by neoclassical sarcophagi and 12 fluted Doric columns.

You’d have thought this sort of posh decadence would have literally died out with the aristocracy — but now a fashion for grand home burials has been revived, as new money tries to emulate old, in a kind of postmortem gentrification. Mockney film director Guy Ritchie is building a personal burial ground on his 1,134-acre Wiltshire estate. And singer Ed Sheeran has created an underground resting place in the grounds of his £3.7mn Suffolk home. Is this what trying to keep 6 feet down with the Joneses looks like?

For the aristocracy, it makes sense to be laid to rest among ancestors — although it feels like the definition of hell to have to spend all eternity with your relatives. It’s surprising there’s the same appeal for Ritchie, who only bought his estate with Madonna in 2001. Still, we are told by Ritchie’s planning agent that his intended tasteful “small private burial ground walled in the local greenstone and flint chequer board, set high on the hillside overlooking the house and the estate” is intended to underscore “the family’s tie to the land”.

Were Ritchie and Sheeran inspired by other upper-crust artists? Virginia Woolf’s ashes were buried beneath an elm tree at Monk’s House in Sussex, marked by the epitaph: “Death is the enemy.” Barbara Cartland, the mother of Diana’s stepmother Raine Spencer, was laid to rest under an oak tree in the grounds of her Italianate manor Camfield Place. Politician Alan Clark sleeps in the impressive grounds of Saltwood Castle, while Lady Fiona Hindlip, the interior designer mother of TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp, was buried at the end of her vast Dorset garden, next to the grave of the family pony Benji.

Being laid to rest on a grand country estate sounds romantic; perhaps less attractive is ending up under a postage-stamp-sized lawn at the back of a terrace. When a three-bedroom house came up for sale in Leeds in 2021, for £125,000, potential buyers were warned the former owner was buried in the garden, at his wish, as he’d been born and died in the house. How reassuring someone loved a place so much they never wanted to leave it.

Being laid to rest on a country estate sounds romantic; perhaps less attractive is ending up under a postage-stamp-sized lawn at the back of a terrace

It isn’t so hard to do. “In principle home burials are perfectly legal,” Jenny Greenland, chartered legal executive at BLB Solicitors, informs me. You just need the freeholder’s consent, and to comply with Environment Agency and Ministry of Justice rules in the UK, such as siting the grave far enough from any water source, a recommended minimum depth of soil of 2ft between the coffin lid and ground level, and someone qualified to perform the ceremony.

The thought of having my home’s former owners buried in the garden makes me squeamish. Would I have to dig my vegetable patch on someone’s gran? Yet estate agents don’t appear too concerned. Rupert Sweeting, partner at estate agent Knight Frank, recalls selling a farmhouse with a grave three-quarters of a mile from the main house. “The buyers were not troubled by it,” he says. But there was a stipulation: “The previous owner was allowed to visit with fair warning.” Houses he has sold with family dog graves in the garden “don’t seem to concern buyers”, he adds.

I suppose for once it would be nice to buy a house knowing that instead of skeletons in the closet it only has corpses in the garden. Still, I wouldn’t do it. “Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones,” as some corny Instagram meme once said. Besides, as Greenland points out, future homeowners can apply for permission to exhume and rebury a body. And that really would be the nail in the coffin.

This article has been updated to correct an attribution of a quote to Thomas Gray

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