Mansfield trail celebrates Quaker links
A new Quaker heritage trail was launched on Saturday 25 April
A new Quaker heritage trail was launched on Saturday 25 April in Mansfield.
The trail includes a number of local sites of significance to Quakers. Among them are almshouses, whose first residents included Friends, and the site of George Fox’s home when he was an apprentice shoemaker.
Although originally from Leicestershire, George Fox lived in Mansfield from the 1640s onwards. It was during his time in the town that he is said to have had the calling to form a new religion.
A memorial plaque was unveiled at the site of the former Meeting house and burial ground. The old Meeting house, where Mansfield’s Quakers had met since the seventeenth century, was demolished in the 1970s. The site is now home to Mansfield’s bus station, completed in 2013. During construction work a burial ground was uncovered. It is now known to be the final resting place for approximately 150 Quakers, who were buried there between the 1700s and 1950s.
The memorial plaque remembers those Quakers who were buried in the burial ground and whose remains now lie in Mansfield Cemetery and some of the headstones in a Garden of Reflection, adjacent to the new Friends Meeting house, where Mansfield’s Quaker community meets today.
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