In a contest between old bones and big hits, cricket is the winner at the attractive county ground of Somerset at Taunton.

For 126 years Somerset’s big hitters, from Harold Gimblett to Ian Botham, have bounced their sixes off the tombstones in the graveyard of St James’s Church. Now the club has won permission to move the dead and extend the outfield.

Today work begins on the excavation and reinterring of 50 bodies just outside of the field of play. After two years of negotiations with the Bishop of Bath and Wells, the Right Rev Peter Price, the cricket club has won permission to buy a patch of the consecrated ground and turn it to sport.

Fifty bodies, which were buried between 1858 and 1888, are in the section of churchyard. No records exist of their names, not even on tombstones which disintegrated in the 1970s.

As yet no relative has come forward to object. It may have helped the case of the club that the Archdeacon of Taunton, the Ven John Reed, is a cricket follower.

The club is paying £75,000 for the section of churchyard. The coffins have disintegrated so the skeletal remains will be placed in a single box and buried under what will become a grassy mound for spectators to sit on, which has been named after Harold Gimblett, whose arrival at the crease would draw clergymen from their ecclesiastical duties.

The South West Regional Development Agency is helping Somerset to fund the project, which is part of a £60 million redevelopment.

Archaeologists will excavate the graves and the reinterment will be marked by a church service.

The agreement will allow the club to bring its boundary 70 yards (64m) from the pitch in accordance with international status. Its straight boundaries are among the shortest in first-class cricket.

“This is not because we intend playing Tests here but so as to ensure some bright spark does not tell us to extend our outfield in the future,” Richard Gould, the chief executive, of Somerset, said.

“We have put up notices around the church and have done all we can to notify the public. No one has carried out anything like this before on a cricket ground. The Diocese did not have any objections and they are keen for us to continue to be a cricket club rather than a housing development,” Mr Gould added.

Phil Frost, the long-serving, award-winning club groundsman, is the only objector to the scheme. He is refusing to use the earth from the churchyard as topsoil for his square.

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