The petitioners sought a faculty to exhume the cremated remains of their mother in order to have them scattered at Porchester Crematorium, where the ashes of their maternal grandparents and other relatives of the deceased had previously been scattered. They were concerned that the Holy Trinity Church in Trowbridge was in the middle of a busy roundabout on a major traffic route and had an uncertain future (partly because it did not hold regular services on site).
The Deputy Chancellor refused the petition. The petitioners failed to establish special circumstances which justified the making of an exception to the presumption of finality in burial.
Following Re Blagdon Cemetery [2002] Fam 299, the presumption is that the burial of human remains in consecrated ground is permanent. The presumption may be rebutted where the Chancellor is satisfied, on the balance of probabilities, that special circumstances have arisen which permit the remains to be exhumed. It is for the petitioner to satisfy the court that such circumstances exist.
Lapse of time is not determinative but is a factor to be taken into account. In this case the deceased’s ashes were interred in 1977, the petitioners contacted the registry for out of court advice in 2019, and finally issued their petition in July 2025. It did not appear that it had been at the forefront of the families’ minds as a pressing matter.
The Deputy Chancellor rejected the petitioners’ arguments that the location of the Church, its current usage, or their concerns as to the future of the Church established special circumstances permitting the exhumation. While there were supportive notes from the deceased’s grandchildren, they only indicated that there were no objections to the exhumation, rather than offering any substantive argument as to why the petition should be granted.
The deceased’s reinterment was to be a scattering of ashes rather than a reburial. This was not in itself determinative. The Deputy Chancellor considered Petchey Ch’s judgment in Re Lambeth Cemetery [2025] ECC Swk 2, in which he opined that scattering (as opposed to strewing) ashes is not always irreverent and is a matter of fact. However, he distinguished it on the basis that that was a case where the remains of the exhumed body were to be united with other members of the family to be scattered together. That was very different from the present case, where the deceased’s ashes would be scattered at the same site as her relatives’ ashes but many years later.
