Headstones discovered on St. Joseph's beach likely over 100 years old, says erosion expert
A Portugal Cove-St. Philip's woman made a grave discovery — literally — while beachcombing in St. Joseph's.
Stephanie Bennett was walking on a beach in the southwest Avalon Peninsula community earlier this month looking for pieces she could include in her crafting when she came across a large slab of what she thought was concrete that appeared to be part of a gravestone.
"Then when I walked up a little bit further, there was another one with some inscriptions on it," Bennett said Friday.
Bennett said the second slab included a larger piece of marble with the name "John Linehan" legible on it. The slab also appeared to suggest that Linehan was located in Salmonier, but her efforts to find out more about Linehan haven't been successful.
She contacted St. Joseph's town clerk Scott Penton about her findings. Penton started thinking about how the sandstone blocks — each about 60 centimetres long, 25 centimetres wide and weighing about 45 kilograms — could have gotten to the beach.
"There's a notch cut into the top in which the old, very old-style marble headstone would have been inserted and then locked into place with old quicklime mortar," Penton said. "The marble, of course, has all either been smashed or eroded away over time, and none of it was visible on the beach. All that was left was the sandstone blocks."
Penton said he's come up with two theories as to how the stones could have ended up on the beach: one is that the stones were located at the cemetery, about 10 metres away, and could have fallen with coastal erosion, and the other is that the cemetery originally extended closer to the beach and erosion over time removed any signs of its original location.
Penton says the discovery might not be exclusive to St. Joseph's, as rural communities often have cemeteries closer to the water due to land composition that is easier to dig up.
"I think this is going to be an ongoing problem for a lot of small Newfoundland communities. We've got sea level rise, we've got climate change, we've got more extreme storms. So this is the sort of thing that we're going to, I think, see more often," he said.
Norm Catto, a retired Memorial University geography professor and an expert on coastal erosion in Newfoundland, says both theories are plausible.
"We've seen examples of both," he said Monday. "If you have a heavy stone, especially if it's vertical or upright and it's not footed, then it will move down the slope. And you really don't need much of a slope to get it to go."
Catto says the stones could have been at the beach a long time before Bennett found them.
"You know, they might have been there for 100 years or more," he said.
Human remains connected to the stones haven't been found, but Gatto says they could have eroded along with the shoreline if where the stones were found was their original resting place.
