A three year long project to research, record and map the burials, monuments and plaques in Dymock churchyard has been completed successfully by a small team of volunteers.

Parts of St Mary’s Church possibly date back to the Norman Conquest and certainly to the 12th century.

The presence of a village priest is mentioned on the Domesday Book of 1086, which indicates the strong likelihood of a church building at that time.

Now visitors to the church can now take advantage of a directory in the north transept, giving location maps and photographs to graves and monuments.

And the idea is that this information, which is currently still in draft form, will soon be bound and published in book form.

Writing in this month’s parish magazine for Dymock, Bob May said: “It is with some relief that we can announce the competition of this project.

“The information will also be available online shortly, by following a link to the church website: dymockchurch.net. This will enable searches by surname as well as providing a photograph and description of the exact location of the grave or memorial.”

Team members involved with the intense research include Ann Ainsworth, Penny Browne, Lynne Haynes, Chris May, Jane Barton, David Clowes, Diana Hunt, Jackie Tweedale, Richard Barton, Glenis Coates, Bob May and Lynn Walker.

The church would have been a well-known landmark for the Dymock Poets, a group of writers who settled near Dymock or visited frequently prior to the First World War.

Their number included Robert Frost, Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke.

There are information boards about the Dymock Poets in St Mary’s, but none of the Dymock Poets are buried there.

However, the church has seen a great deal of history.

According to an online resource, “The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture”, the church may even have been part of a medieval monastery.

The Flaxley Abbey Cartulary contains the phrase “de monasterio de Dimmoc”, in a deed dated to around 1190.