Friends of Birdcage Walk
and St Andrew's Churchyard

Birdcage Walk, lined with pleached lime trees, is a distinctive and famous pathway through the old St. Andrew's churchyard, Clifton, Bristol.

Friends of Birdcage Walk is a community group set up to care for, maintain and improve the site, and to provide information for the public about its history and environment.

We schedule regular working parties (usually 3rd Sunday of the month, 11am) open to anyone, to tidy up the churchyard and walkway, trying to balance allowing access to the graves with maintaining habitat for wildlife. These are subject to the weather forecast, so feel free to come along and join in, but do check Upcoming Events the day before for any last minute cancellation. Stout boots and gardening gloves are essential, as there are many trip hazards and bramble thorns. Bring secateurs or loppers if you have them, we cannot supply tools. The work can be physical, and gardeners need to be reasonably fit - check out the Health & Safety Policy.  The Seasonal Gardening Plan will give some idea of the tasks in hand. However, if you just want to come along and meet the group we're always ready for a bit of a chat.

There is also a WhatsApp group to organise other working sessions, for the more energetic and experienced gardener, meeting more frequently, when the weather looks promising  - Send email for details and to join group.

All the memorial stones are now listed on FIndagrave.com and most have GPS coordinates to give their position (click on 'Show Map' on the entry to open a marked Google map). Many of the stones already have photos, and more will continue to be added. The burial  registers do have many more additional entries, where no gravestone is present and the position of burial is unknown.

From Building Conservation website on Saving Cemeteries:

The gothic taste for overgrown cemeteries with ivy-clad tombstones and tumbling monuments poses another threat. Of course there is some appeal to a ‘wild’ landscape, but these are complex sites that need careful management. Unchecked vegetation is not benign. It poses serious challenges to the conservation of cemetery buildings and structures, as well as their setting. It can mask historic landscape design and cause the destabilisation, and eventually the collapse, of its built features. This deterioration only adds to the difficulties and final costs of conservation. 

Historic cemeteries are also vulnerable to long-held assumptions about ecology and heritage. All too often these two ‘interests’ are presumed to be at odds with each other, pursuing competing and incompatible objectives in the management of our cemeteries. This is far from the case. Well-planned management can support a mosaic of habitats, while conserving and better revealing the historic landscape. Shady monocultures of ivy and sycamore achieve neither of these objectives. Management is therefore essential to both biodiversity and the preservation of valuable heritage assets.