Love Your Burial Ground Week, a national campaign to encourage people to celebrate local cemeteries, starts on June 8.

Guided walks have been organised to highlight the heritage of cemeteries in Swanpool and Ponsharden.

The Swanpool walks will educate participants about some of the fascinating people buried in the cemetery, including famous artists such as Henry Scott Tuke, William Ingram and Sophie Anderson; whose paintings can be seen at the Falmouth Art Gallery.

A Bee Walk and Bug Hunt, led by Kevin Thomas, will also celebrate the flora and fauna in this relatively undisturbed green space.

An afternoon at the historic Ponsharden Cemeteries, Penryn Road, will reveal the lives of Packet ship captains, tradespeople, surgeons, shoe and boot makers and their families interred in the Dissenters' Burying Ground; so-called because they were Christians who refused to join the established Church of England.

While the adjacent Jewish Cemetery was recently listed by Historic England as one of the top ten irreplaceable sites of faith and belief in the country, a list which includes such sites as Stonehenge and Canterbury Cathedral.

These free events coincide with the launch of an ambitious three-year conservation project at the Ponsharden Cemeteries after generations of neglect and wanton vandalism, aided by a substantial grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The project will be led by the Falmouth Town Council Cultural Services, and Grounds and Facilities teams, working with the Friends of Ponsharden Cemeteries which was formed to protect what is now a Scheduled Monument placed on the England Heritage at Risk register.

Henrietta Boex, director of Cultural Services, said: "The people buried there played their part in the story of Falmouth and Penryn. Their different faiths are a reminder of the richness and variety of our community and the histories we share.

"We want Ponsharden to be a place of discovery for all ages."

It was in 2012 that two Falmouth men, Tom Weller and Robert Nunn, having read a report on the abandoned Ponsharden burial ground, volunteered to clear it by hand and record the details of what they could find.

They published the biographies of the people, inscribed on the memorials and headstones they found, in their book The Dissenters’ Burying Ground, Ponsharden, Cornwall.

The burials included Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists and Quakers from around Falmouth and Penryn who, before the cemetery opened in 1808, were often laid to rest in unconsecrated ground in local church yards. The last burial was in 1930.

Falmouth’s Jewish community was established in the 1740s by Alexander Moses, known as Zender Falmouth. He is buried in the adjacent Jewish Cemetery , as is a famous watch and clock maker Moses Jacob who died in 1807, whose family invested considerably in the local economy including the development of Falmouth Docks.

The two Bee Walk and Bug Hunts with Kevin Thomas will take place at Old Falmouth Cemetery on Saturday June 8 and Tuesday June 11 at 2pm.

The historical Falmouth Cemetery: The Biography of a Town walks will take place on Sunday June 9 at 11am and Thursday June 13 at 5.30pm.

The Dissenter's Burying Ground and Jewish Cemetery in Ponsharden will be open to the public on Sunday June 16 from 2pm to 4pm. Entry is free, and parking in the Park and Float.