St Michaels Cemetery

The burial of Catholics even in the 1860, still depended on the local authority providing a place in the municiple Cemetries, there being no consecrated ground available where they might bury their own dead. Father Burke, after much searching, found an open plot of eight acres for sale on a sloping hillside of Rivilin Glen. With the help of a non-Catholic friend, he purchased the land. Which was then walled round, recieving govenment approval as a burial ground in August 1862. The following month, the cornerstone of the original St Michaels Chapel at Rivilin was laid and consecrated by Bishop Cornthwaite at a ceremony, in which societies, guilds and confraternities in full regalia and bearing their banners, with drum and pipe band, who had marched from St Vincent's lined the drive to the site of the new chapel. By the summer of 1863, the entire work on the Cemetery and it's Chapel had been completed, which was to serve the Catholics of Sheffield until 1878 when the present St Michaels Church was built.