British Garrison Cemetery of Kandy

"The British Garrison Cemetery occupies a wooded slope in central Kandy, next to the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic. Its roughly 195 identified graves, packed into under a third of a hectare, record British soldiers, officials and family members who died in Kandy through the nineteenth century, most of them from malaria and cholera. The historian J.P. Lewis noted the true number of burials was likely higher, since many graves were never marked.

Sources disagree on when the cemetery opened: 1817, shortly after the British took the Kandyan kingdom, is the date most often given, though the Commonwealth War Graves Commission dates it to 1822. The oldest legible headstone, from 2 December 1817, belongs to James McGlashan — though that grave reportedly stood outside the original boundary before being absorbed into the cemetery, part of why the founding date is disputed. Burials continued until 1873, when a colonial-era ban on burial within municipal limits closed the ground to all but relatives of those already interred; the last burial, Annie Fritz, was in 1951.

Among those buried here are Sir John D'Oyly, who represented the Crown at the 1815 Kandyan Convention; Lady Elizabeth Gregory, wife of Governor William Henry Gregory; Lieutenant-General John Fraser, engineer of the 205-foot Satinwood Bridge over the Mahaweli at Peradeniya; and William Robert Lyte, grandson of the hymn writer Henry Francis Lyte. One tombstone, John Spottiswood Robertson's, records a death by wild elephant. The site was restored in 1998 with support from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, declared a protected archaeological monument in 2011, and is kept today by a volunteer group, the Friends of the British Garrison Cemetery, with the trustees of St. Paul's Church, Kandy. In 2013, King Charles III, then Prince of Wales, visited the ground."