Cemetery of St Cuthbert's College, Ushaw

Cemetery with, memorials, cloister and boundary wall, 1852, designed by Joseph Hansom with later extension.

MATERIALS: Gothic coursed squared sandstone with sandstone copings to the boundary wall (cast iron railings to the west) and the cloister formed by a timber colonnade beneath a slate roof. Individual monuments are largely sandstone but with some polished granite and marble and some wrought and cast iron.

PLAN: the cemetery is rectangular in plan with a convex west boundary. Opposed gateways are roughly midway along the north and south sides. The L-plan cloister occupies the east end and part of the north side with its entrance on the central east-west axis which runs through the cemetery. Gothic style.

CLOISTER: the cloister is 9 bays long along its east elevation and 8 bays along the north. The bays are formed by simple braced timber uprights rising off a plain wall matching the boundary to the south. The gabletted entrance occupies the central bay of the east elevation. Inside the cloister the walls are lined with marble and brass memorial plaques with further brass plaques on the inside of the wall of beneath the colonnade. At the south end of the cloister stands a Crucifixion with a marble statue of the Sacred Heart by A. B. Wall at the west end. Brick floor incorporating memorial slabs.

CEMETERY: both entrances to the cemetery are fitted with low Gothic timber gates, with that to the South surmounted by a timber lychgate. The cemetery contains a number of substantial C19 Gothic grave markers, many with tomb covers. including the grave tomb of Henry Marsland designed by Edward Welby Pugin in 1861.

The cemetery contains a number of good quality tombs, almost entirely gothic in style. Among the monuments the Chadwick Tomb and the Memorial Cross are of particular note.

The MEMORIAL CROSS, c. 1870 was designed by Canon Scruton commemorating Rev. Thomas Crowe. It has a sandstone ashlar base, with a wrought iron cross. The chamfered plinth sits above 3 steps and supports a high square pedestal with chamfers and broach stops; bronze plaques in west and east faces have Latin inscriptions. The elaborate cross has flower decoration.

BISHOP CHADWICK'S TOMB, 1884 by Archibald Dunn of Dunn and Hansom is a table tomb consisting of an ashlar grave slab (with raised decoration of a Bishop's crosier, chalice and Host) with a cross-coped canopy with fishscale decoration supported on 4 pink granite shafts. It is a free copy, with some reconstruction, of damaged parts of Godfrey de Bouillon's tomb at Jerusalem.