St. Bathans (non Catholic) cemetery |
Pos S 44° 52.415' |
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Yes, St. Bathans has two historical cemeteries.
In the townsip itself in Cross Street is the Catholic Church and it has a church cemetery with it.
Down the hill and beside the stream is the alternative cemetery for all other denominitions.
Assuming you travel down from the township there is a clearly signed gate on the left just before where the road crosses the stream.
That gate leads into a working farm paddock so please remember to close the gate afterwards.
A long lane then leads to the cemetery on the face of a hill. Recently (2018) considerable effort has been applied to remove large trees and re-erect the fence, making the site airy and sunlit. A descriptor panel has been erected at the bottom and above are a collection of old style upright headstones, all in very good condition. This cemetery is still current but intended for local families whose members are already interred... Much of the mining done in this area was by means of water jets blasting away the gravel and finer materials and running the resultant mix through sluices that trapped the heavier gold particles and leaving the mess to flow on downstream. Most of the streams and rivers had claims on them with large dredges operating in the Clutha River itself. The gold the miners found was weathered from a rock matrix that was difficult to mine directly as there were few if any quartz structures. Quartz is indicative of a geological re-melting process which collects minerals into vein-like structures. Without this pre-cooking the gold stubbonly stayed within the rock and even now in the one remaining modern mine (McRae's Flat) requires a roasting process before it can be extracted. |
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This page was constructed after the on-line database was created and there was little point in duplicating material which is changing daily in any case. Click on the MOP link and log in. Choose HEADSTONES then fill in the target box with the surname of interest OR enter any cemetery name to show a list of ALL the records for that cemetery, remembering to use the pull-down option to switch from sinple to cemetery. Once in a given record the headstone picture or pictures can be downloaded. |