Buried under the ground in the strangers graveyard are hundreds of stories just waiting to be told.

Two writers, Kim Kneen and Vicky Lloyd-West, released their joint book, ’Story From Stone’, a collection of 40 short stories which puts flesh onto the bones of some of the people buried in the grounds of the historic Ballure Chapel, on the outskirts of Ramsey.

The chapel itself is now a private home but has been a religiously-significant site for more than 1,000 years and was known as the ’graveyard for strangers’, where people not originally from the island were interred.

By visiting the remaining headstones and trawling through available public records, Kim and Vicky have pieced together details about some of the lives of the people buried there and have brought them, to life in carefully-crafted short stories, presented in the book alongside illustrations by Jo Davies.

The characters in the book reflect the amazing variety of people who ended up under the Ballure earth, including a slave ship captain, a royal surgeon, drowned deckhands washed ashore, babies and infants killed by Scarlet fever, Counts and Barons, school teachers, industrialists and many more.

’Ballure Church gradually became known as the graveyard for strangers for Ramsey,’ said Kim.

’If you weren’t local, if you drowned in the bay, shipwrecked and washed up drowned on the beach, if you had died whilst on holiday, you ended up buried at Ballure.

Vicky added: ’There are around 75 headstones still at the site of Ballure chapel and we became intrigued by different people and by the inscriptions there.

’We wondered about them, as to how they ended up on the Isle of Man.

’We chose different people to research and used the burial records to give us bits of information, sometimes just a line like somebody had drowned in the harbour, or been shipwrecked off the coast and their body washed up somewhere near.

’We took that as a basis and managed to find out quite a lot about some people and from those facts we wrote imaginative stories based on what we found out.

’We were able to take information from their wills and things that we found in local records, newspapers and create short stories about them.’

Among the stories, which vary from light to dark and tragic in tone and content, is the story of William Armstrong, who worked as a butler at Milntown for 50 years, whose life story takes in Ramsey high society and Captain Nathaniel Ireland, a slave ship captain who retired after a life spent at sea involved in the most dubious of trades. Edward Shackell was buried there after he committed suicide on the journey from England to the Isle of Man and another tale of a tragic shipwreck ties in the visit of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria to Ramsey in 1847.

One of the more intriguing tales is the story of Richard Mark, a strict and authoritarian figure who was the lay principal of the Ramsey Grammar School from 1838.

He is pictured as a stern and unfeeling figure privately grieving over the loss of his two sons to sickness.

He then appears in a later story, in connection to the death of his aunt-by-marriage, Grace McConnell.

’This project started out of curiosity but as we went along, these people became real to us,’ said Vicky.

’They were real people after all.

’I find myself walking through the streets of Ramsey and imaging our people mingling in among the people today in the same streets and in the same buildings that they would have done 150 or so years ago.’

’Ballure chapel was deconsecrated in 2004 and a lot of the headstones were probably lost when the chapel ground was turned into a memorial garden,’ added Kim.

’There is a risk of these strangers’ identities being lost and this is our small way of commemorating just a few of them and our small effort to keeping them alive.’

’Story From Stone’ is available from both the Ramsey and Port Erin branches of Bridge Bookshop and the Snug, in Ramsey.

by Mike Wade

Twitter:@iomnewspapers