Explore The Church
COLUMBARIUM
At the top of the churchyard stands an imposing memorial originally known as the Pixley Sepulchre. It was built on the instructions of Marie Noel for the Labey, Anquetil, Falle, Messervy, Vaudin and Le Brun families, who were successive owners of the property now known as St Clement’s Farm. The memorial was built by Edward Pixley, a prominent monumental mason who was born in Gibraltar in 1793 and who had premises in the Parade, St Helier. An article describing the history of the Pixley Sepulchre was first published in the 1992 Annual Bulletin of the Société Jersiaise and may be viewed here.
The memorial had been vacant for many years but thanks to the generosity of the current owners of St Clement’s Farm, it has now being repurposed as a columbarium. A columbarium is a place for the respectful (and usually public) storage of funeral urns holding cremated remains. The term comes from the Latin columba, meaning dove, and originally referred to the compartmentalized housing for doves and pigeons called a dovecote.
The Pixley Sepulchre was fitted out with a slate roof in 2020 and niches covering the inside walls will be installed in due course. It will then be possible for parishioners to rent the niches in order to store the ashes of their loved ones. This could be for a relatively short time (before arrangements can be made to bury them elsewhere, for example), or for a much longer period of time. It is the intention that ashes will be deposited in the natural churchyard once the rental period has ended.
We hope that our columbarium will prove to be a useful option to parishioners who are considering what to do with the ashes of their loved ones.
The Bailiwick Express reported on the first occasion the Columbarium was used, in July 2020. You can read the article here. An article on the Columbarium, entitled “A Place for Memories”, was published in Rural magazine in its Summer 2021 edition. You can read the article here.
