Plague Victims in Wigan

With a half hour to spare today I took a walk to Wigan Parish Church mainly to satisfy my own curiosity regarding the curious date stone that's randomly built into the stone wall of a building that backs onto the churchyard where the plague pit discussed in this thread is located.

Below is a picture that I took of the stone


I doubt that the wall the stone now sits in is the wall that the stone is refering to. Also if you look closely the stone appears to have the old builders trick of having some slate packing placed underneath it to support it whilst the mortar bed sets due to it's weight.

Thanks for taking the time to look Mr H

I wonder if the original wall sat further back, and the railway was built on part of the burial ground. I'm sure I've seen mention of this somewhere. Maybe the stone was reset where it now?

Map from Wigan World Peter walsh



https://www.wiganworld.co.uk/album/photo.php?opt=5&id=34243&gallery=All+Saints+Church+graveyard+1847&page=1

Hi Lolly, by overlaying a modern map over the one from WiganWorld you can see that part of the churchyard is now under King Street West so the churchyard wall was indeed once further back towards the railway.

Certainly part of the original churchyard wall would have had to be removed and altered to allow King Street West to pass through it so this is probably the area from where the stone in my picture was taken from.

It is also conceivable that King Street West is actually built either knowingly or unknowingly over part of the plague pit and it would be interesting to know if any human remains were found at the time when this part of King Street West was being built.

I was in the Parish Church Gardens on Saturday and a man in his thirties or so came to talk to me. He said he’d been part of a renovation team working on what was a nightclub on KSW when bones were found below it and work had to be halted. The bones were examined and determined to be from the plague pit, he said he learned there were some 10,000 bodies in it.

Your post has jogged my memory Jo anne as if I remember rightly a story appeared in the Wigan Observer in the 1980's that work also had to be halted when a skeleton was found beneath what had been Lowes on Market Place after they had demolished the building, can't remember any other details other than the remains were really old and were eventually removed and given a christian burial elsewhere within the churchyard.

With human remains turning up further and further away from the church you have to wonder just how big of a footprint the churchyard originally was?

Mr H's Hot Pot wrote:

With human remains turning up further and further away from the church you have to wonder just how big of a footprint the churchyard originally was?

I feel sure I've seen a map somewhere that shows a graveyard at the back of the church which would be about where Lowes was built.
On with the search

Then again maybe not

It appears that the wall is grade 2 listed

https://www.wiganbuildings.co.uk/building.php?id=558