A 'ROMPING' rise in construction costs may mean cutting back the amount of work that can be achieved in the restoration of Falmouth's Jewish cemetery.

In her first report to Cultural Services Committee since last October, cultural services director Henrietta Boex warned that they may be unable to achieve as much as they had originally hoped when awarded a £45,000 Historic England grant last year.

"We should be cognisant that there is romping construction inflation at present and it may be that we will achieve less than we envisioned two years ago when the application was submitted to the National Lottery Heritage Fund."

She said the contract for the restoration of headstones in the Jewish Cemetery in Ponsharden, Falmouth has now been let to Torquil McNeillage.

She also says further encouraging negotiations with Sally Stracey Monumental Masons are ongoing but nearing completion. In addition, she says Jebb Consulting Engineers have been appointed to design the pinning and mesh system for retaining the exposed north boundary adjacent to the Falmouth Road.

In January last year Historic England awarded a grant of £45,000 towards the restoration of the Jewish and Congregationalist Cemeteries in Falmouth.

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The grant is part of a £500,000 project to repair the gravestones, tombs, walls, entrance stairs, and boundary walls of the cemeteries, and to create a secure, safe, natural green space for the community and visitors to enjoy. This will include virtual access, with a new interactive 3D reconstruction of the site giving unprecedented access to the cemeteries as they would have looked when in use.

The Jewish burial ground was laid out in 1780 and a Congregationalist cemetery established in 1808, founded at a time when communities of both faiths were flourishing in Falmouth. In the entire UK there are only about 25 surviving Jewish burial grounds that pre-date the early 19th century, of which seven are to be found in the southwest. The Jewish burial ground at Falmouth is unique in its proximity to another nonconformist cemetery.

It is hoped doorways will be repaired and made safe so that visitors can once again access the cemeteries by their historic entrances. One of the most significant works will be to construct a path through and between the cemeteries, to help protect graves and create a symbolic bridge between the different faith communities. The project will take around two years to complete.

The last burial in the Jewish cemetery took place in 1913, and the last nonconformist burial in 1935. Both cemeteries then went out of use and by the second half of the 20th century they were neglected and very overgrown.

The site was protected as a scheduled monument in 2002 and placed on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register in 2009. In 2011, a group of local volunteers came together to save the site, clearing it of damaging vegetation and carrying out surveys. In 2014 the Friends of Ponsharden Cemeteries was formed, and an ambitious repair plan was drawn up by 2017.

The Jewish cemetery contains 50 recorded burials, all but one dating to between 1780 and 1880. Inscriptions dating to before 1838 are exclusively in Hebrew script, but later headstones include some details in English. The plot is surrounded by a wall, and close to the entrance are remains of a small mortuary chapel known as an ohel, a very rare survival.

The Congregationalist cemetery also has a small ruined mortuary chapel and contains 91 monuments commemorating 235 names. Careful recording by volunteers and a meticulous search of burial records has shown that the cemetery contains a remarkable number of graves which are unmarked or are missing their headstones. Some are evident as elongated low mounds on the ground.

In 2018, the Jewish cemetery was voted as one of ten sites which tell the story of faith and belief in Historic England’s Irreplaceable: A History of England in 100 Places, reflecting its importance to our national story.