St. Wilfrid's Catholic Cemetery in Preston, Lancashire

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Get directions St-Wilfrid St
Preston, City of Preston, Lancashire PR1 2US England

Coordinates: 53.75817, -2.70449
Cemetery ID:

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About these numbers These percentages indicate the number of Find a Grave memorials that have a grave photo or GPS coordinates. We don't know the total number of burials in a cemetery, so we cannot calculate a percentage of those with memorials, photos or GPS coordinates.

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In 1816, the Reverend Joseph "Daddy" Dunn, priest at St Wilfrid's Chapel, purchased a plot of land to use as a burial ground for the town's Catholic population. The cemetery, in what was to become St Wilfrid Street, was behind the school Mr Dunn had opened in Fox Street two years earlier, and was a short walk from St Wilfrid's Chapel, which had no open space immediately around it.

St Wilfrid's Cemetery opened in late 1817, with the first burial, that of Mrs Rose McNally, taking place on the 13th of December 1817. The Oratory was licensed to perform services on 2 April 1818, and over the next 36 years over 5000 members of Preston's Catholic community were interred there.

The cemetery was closed by an act of Parliament dated 30 January 1854, with the last burial at St Wilfrid's being that of Thomas Turner, aged 11 weeks, on 8 April 1854. (His mother had been interred there two months earlier). As years past, the cemetery fell into a sad state of neglect. At some point all of the headstones were removed and various buildings of a temporary nature came and went. The Oratory was pulled down not long after the photo was taken in 1955.