A Vermont woman cleans the gravestones of people she never met — and 57 retired hens are looking for a garden in Hereford

Mary Bailey's headstone is white marble and it still looks new. She died at 21 in 1852. In the neighbouring plot in the same Vermont burying ground, her sister Eliza's stone wears decades of moss so thick the carving has gone soft. 1

Caitlin Abrams cleaned Mary's stone last year. This month she came back for Eliza's with a spray bottle and a small stiff brush. 1

She wet the marble and worked in short strokes, lifting dirt out of the carved flowers. "Sometimes you can definitely see a difference right away," she said. "Other times, it's a month later you'll come back and go 'oh my gosh, it's beautiful.'" 1

Abrams belongs to a corner of social media where people film themselves cleaning graves, which grew during the pandemic, when people found company in thinking about the dead. 1 Her videos carry a second half. Before she films, she works through birth, marriage and death certificates and old newspaper clippings, then tells the story of whoever is under the stone.

"It's like journalism, but for dead people," she said. 1

She works on 18th and 19th century stones in remote Vermont graveyards, and she picks slowly. "I let them pick me," she said. "I'm drawn to it and kind of look at it and see how I feel." 1 Young women and children draw her most, she said, because she is a mother of two and because men's stories are the ones that usually get told. 1

Grave cleaning is a craft with a right way and a wrong one, and the wrong way films just as well. Jon Appell, a monument restoration professional who runs Atlas Preservation, said a significant number of the people doing it "kind of just want fame". 1 Aggressive brushing strips the surface off a soft stone, and rough handling can crumble one that has stood since the 1800s. 1

In 2021 an amateur genealogist in Maryland admitted she had scrubbed roughly 200 gravestones in a way that left them damaged. 2

The National Park Service's conservation centre opens its guidance on the question with one rule: do no harm. 3 Its researchers have documented what power washers and power tools do in historic cemeteries, and they explain why the harm lasts. Roughen a stone and its surface catches and holds more pollutant, moisture and microbes, which speeds the next century of decay. The guidance recommends a biocidal cleaner and rules out power tools, grinding, re-lettering and polishing. 3

Abrams agrees that the technique and the cemetery's permission both come before the first stroke. 1 Workshops teach the method; in 2016 hundreds of Louisiana volunteers used it on a Civil War-era cemetery. 1

The data visualisation expert Joshua Stevens mapped more than 144,000 American graveyards and cemeteries, many of which need cleaning, restoration and preservation. 1

Abrams makes the case that they were never meant to be avoided places. American cemeteries, she said, were among the country's first public parks. 1

"I like the idea of a cemetery as a place where people can come and be and exist with the people who have passed before us," she said. 1

In Mexico families clean and decorate graves and cover them in orange marigolds for Day of the Dead, which runs from 31 October to 2 November. 1

On Sunday, 57 hens will change hands at the Rotherwas Industrial Estate in Hereford, one of 50 rehoming days the British Hen Welfare Trust runs around the UK. 4

The birds come out of commercial egg farms at about 18 months old, when their laying slows. Traditionally they went to slaughter. Since 2005 the trust has rehomed more than a million hens, 40,682 of them this year, and it expects to pass 50,000 for 2026 by December. 4 Its own count is more than 1,108,861 birds moved by 1,400 volunteers through 50 sites, at roughly 60,000 a year. 5

James Bartlett volunteers for the trust and keeps eight rescue hens in his garden in Belmont, Hereford. "They've got so much life left to live and they deserve this," he said. "They deserve to have a second chance, a better life and a nice retirement home." 4

His wife Charlie set up a stall at the front of the house, selling eggs for a donation. "It's been such a sense of community feel," she said. "Children coming knocking on the door asking for eggs." 4

Carol Wall, of Tenbury Wells, keeps several rescue hens of her own. "They are my pets and I absolutely love them," she said. "I could waste a lot of hours, just watching them scratching away. They've all got their own individual personalities." 4

Eliza's stone is halfway. The carving is coming back, and Abrams will know more when she returns in a month. 1

The warnings about grave cleaning rest on something a video cannot show: how much pressure this particular stone will take. The Park Service's answer is a method, a biocidal cleaner and a soft brush, and a workshop before anyone starts on stone that has already survived two centuries. 3

Sunday's hens need a coop and a run, and the trust asks adopters to register with it in advance. 46 Abrams, for her part, has Eliza's stone to finish, and a month to wait before she can tell whether it worked. 1