The area around Breedon church has been used for burials since the Iron Age. The current churchyard can be split into two sections. The “old churchyard”, which is all around the church, can be told apart from the “new churchyard” to the north by its higher ground and line of wide-spaced trees that ran along the original border. The new churchyard was donated to the church in 1903 by Matthew Ingle Joyce, who was born in Breedon and became a High Court Judge.

From 1702, those buried in the churchyard were remembered through the use of slate memorials quarried firstly at Swithland in nearby Charnwood and later from Wales. This means that many can be still be read now, making them very useful for those wanting to know more about the people buried here. Some of their stories can be found here.

For enquiries about burials in the new churchyard (almost all burials after 1903 took place here), please contact Rev. Canon Sue Field on flagstaffrector@gmail.com. The old churchyard has been surveyed and indexed by volunteers as part of the recent heritage project, funded by the National Lottery. A numbered plan of marked graves in the old churchyard and an index of all the individuals remembered on memorials is available for download below. If you are researching the fallen men of Breedon please visit our dedicated page by clicking here.

Download a searchable spreadsheet of the graveyard index

How to use the survey

An index of all those with memorials in the old churchyard is available here. Each memorial has a zone number and unique number that can be used to locate them.

The old churchyard has been split into 7 zones. This includes the church (zone 6) and a small number of graves originally outside the east end of the church that were moved when renovations were made to this area during the 20^th century (zone 7). A plan of all the zones is available here.

Plans of each zone are available below. Each memorial has been labelled with its unique number that can be used to locate them on the ground. The plans were made by locating memorials through aerial photographs and then checking them on the ground. Most graves are identified by a line; those that are rectangles are either chest tombs or stones that have been laid flat.

The plan for zone 1 can be downloaded here.

The plan for zone 2 can be downloaded here.

The plan for zones 3, 4 and 5 can be downloaded here.

The plan for zone 7 can be downloaded here.

There is no plan available for zone 6.