Just an open space really, but the final resting place of 2,858 former patients of the nearby High Royds Hospital. The hospital was opened in 1888 as the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum and took in mentally ill patients normally kept in prisons and the workhouse. Patients would expect to stay at the institution until they died and would then be given a pauper's funeral at this burial ground. There were no headstones, and probably no relatives present at the funeral as patients were largely abandoned when taken in at the hospital. The last burial took place in 1969 and the hospital finally closed in 2003.
Remarkable, heartbreaking, and fascinating, too.
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