Funders

Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Responsive Mode: Curiosity Award

We received seed funds from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Curiosity Award scheme to deliver the Ballast Hills Burial Ground: Rediscovery and Reimaging project. This project running from July 2024 to December 2025 brings together expertise from such disciplines as history, library and information studies, human geography, and archaeology, with a strong emphasis on public engagement and co-production. Our efforts are guided by three primary aims: 

  1. Enhancing BHBG Resource Accessibility: we aim to make BHBG resources more accessible through a comprehensive audit, conversations with resource holders, inventorying gravestone inscriptions, and developing a resource plan to prioritize future actions. 
  1. Collating Stakeholder Interests: we’re creating a stakeholder map to identify, analyse, and prioritize stakeholders. This will inform a community engagement plan, which includes local communities, communities of interest, and descendant communities. 
  1. Discovering BHBG’s Historical Significance: through a desk-based assessment, we’ll highlight BHBG’s local, regional, and national importance during the post-medieval period. Additionally, we’ll develop a tailored research framework linked to related sites in the UK. 

Achieving these aims will pave the way for further inquiries, sparking new research questions and, inevitably, opportunities for additional funding. Our engagement strategy supports co-production, with dissemination of findings through interpretive materials, public talks/walks, newsletters, online sources, and academic outputs.  

Newcastle University’s Centre for Heritage

Thanks to the Heritage NUCoRE funds, we’re underway with the creation of a Life Register web-based database. This initiative aims to eventually allow crowd-sourced information about individuals buried or memorialised at BHBG to be gathered and made freely accessible online.

Newcastle University’s HaSS Faculty’s Research Institutes Fund

Bridging funds to fuel project development and exposure in April and May 2024.

Newcastle University’s HaSS Faculty’s Research Institutes: Pioneer Award

Funds to hold a workshop in July 2023 at Newcastle University, gathering together historians, librarians, archaeologists, and key stakeholders. Through our collaborative discussions, it became evident that the BHBG initiative holds significant timeliness and urgency. Here’s why:

  • Increasing Interest: there a notable surge in interest regarding genealogical research and graveyard databases.
  • Community Engagement: ongoing discussions within the Ouseburn community highlight the importance of defining the historic burial ground’s boundaries and associated responsibilities.
  • Heritage Preservation: concerns regarding the long-term preservation of surviving gravestones have been raised, as most gravestones are arranged as a pathway becoming more worn as time progresses.

Newcastle City Council

Funds ran through the Ouseburn Trust to perform a pilot study at BHBG in 2022 to gather ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and 3D light scanning images. The GPR revealed the earlier pathways and burial clusters exist under the surface, while the 3D light scanning showed that accelerated information recovery was possible through scanning the remaining gravestones.