The gathering
A graveside service only
No chapel, no procession from here. Everyone meets at the cemetery, the service is held at the graveside, and that is the whole of it.
What this includes, and what it does not
The first column is ours to do and ours to charge for. The second is either somebody else's charge — the cemetery, the crematory, the clergy, the newspaper, the airline — or it is a thing this arrangement genuinely does not involve. Anything bought on your behalf is passed on at what it costs us.
What this includes
- The transfer to the cemetery and the bearers
- Chairs and a canopy at the graveside for whoever needs to sit
- A reading, a prayer, a piece of music — as short or as full as you like
What it does not
- Use of our chapel or reception rooms
- The cemetery's own charges for opening and closing the grave
The part we would rather you heard from us
It is shorter, simpler and cheaper, and in bad weather it is genuinely hard on older mourners. Ask us about the cemetery's covered chapel if January is a factor.
How short it actually is
From everybody standing to everybody walking back to the cars is usually fifteen to twenty-five minutes. Some are eight. That is not a shortened funeral, it is a different shape: there is no procession from here, no chapel, no coming in and going out. People meet at the cemetery gate, walk or drive to the grave, and it happens there.
It suits a family that wanted something small and it suits one that has already had the gathering elsewhere. It does not suit a large crowd, because thirty people standing on a lawn cannot all hear the person speaking and there is nothing to sit on unless we have brought it.
The weather is the whole of the risk
There are no walls. The canopy covers the immediate family and the person leading the service, and not much else. Chairs go out as a matter of course rather than on request, and there are never enough of them for everybody, so they are for whoever needs them most.
Heat in July is as hard on an older mourner as cold in January, and worse, because nobody thinks to warn anyone about it. Soft ground takes heels straight down into it. Say something to people beforehand about flat shoes and a coat: it sounds like fussing and it is the difference between an eighty-year-old standing through it and an eighty-year-old going back to the car.
The cemetery's rules, which are not ours
Every cemetery has its own, they differ more than anybody expects, and they are worth knowing before a notice with a time on it goes anywhere. How many cars may come through the gate. Whether a procession may drive in at all or has to park and walk. Where the cars wait. What hour the gates shut, which matters, because a late start loses a slot rather than delaying it. Whether anything at all may be left on the grave afterwards, and for how long.
We ask that office those questions for you and we will tell you the answers plainly, including the ones you will not like. What we cannot do is change any of them — the cemetery is a separate business with its own diary and its own bill.
Ask about the covered chapel
A great many cemeteries have a small chapel or a covered shelter near the gate, and a great many families never learn it is there. Some cemeteries will hold the whole service in it and then go out to the grave for the committal only, which turns a twenty-minute stand in the rain into a two-minute one.
There is sometimes a charge for it and sometimes not. If the funeral falls in the middle of winter, or anybody in the immediate family is frail, ask us to ask. It is the single most useful question about a graveside service and hardly anybody asks it.
What we do not do
Every one of these is short, and every one of them is here because a family somewhere was told the opposite of it on the day of a funeral.
Before you fix a time at the cemetery
Let us ask that office about the gates, the cars and whether there is a covered chapel. The answers change what you tell people, and they are quicker to get than families expect.