Seven-foot-wide travellers' gravestone ordered to be downscaled

But Stephen Eyre QC also side-stepped church regulations to approve other aspects of the gravestone – even though they go against normal church yard rules.

Chancellor Eyre, Chancellor of the Diocese of Lichfield, in his role as a judge of the Church of England's Consistory Court, ruled the memorial – which will include interlocking hearts, gold lettering and images of a horse, a river bank and fishing rod – must be smaller than the one planned by the Mr Jones' widow.

The planned gravestone would not only cover the grave of David Jones, a leading member of the Lichfield travelling community, who died last May, but also the head of the adjacent grave, which is earmarked for his wife when she dies.

The application for the gravestone, which would have had a seven-foot-wide base and stood 4ft 4in high in St Michael's church yard, was made by Mr Jones' widow, Mary.

The Church of England has strict rules about the size and nature of gravestones – and the planned stone conflicted with those rules in a number of ways.

Chancellor Eyre said that the gravestone in Bahama Blue stone would bear the image of a horse's head, a depiction of a riverbank scene with a dog and fishing rod and in gold lettering wording such as "Rhoda with love" and Lough and Family."

He continued: "The proposed memorial does not accord with the Churchyard Regulations. It falls outside in a number of respects including the type of stone, the use of gold lettering, the number of images, and its shape.

"Most markedly it would be very substantially larger than memorials authorised by the regulations. It would be twice the maximum permitted width."

Local rector, the Ven Simon Baker had told the Chancellor that Mr Jones was the "patriarch of a group of traveller families" and that the proposed memorial had a number of features reflecting that heritage.

The Chancellor said that the travelling families Mr Jones was connected with had a long standing connection with the church which remained "lively and valued" and some of them played an active part in the regular life of the church.

"The concern is that the proposed memorial would overshadow and dominate these in a way which is not thought appropriate," he said.

He added that the Rector and church council have sought to discourage "large and florid" memorials and that there was concern that to permit the proposed memorial would undermine those efforts.

In the circumstances he ruled that the base must be scaled down to be only 5ft wide. He said that although this was still wider than normally permitted he had taken into account that eventually when Mrs Jones is buried there it will effectively be a double plot and her name will also be put on the headstone.