{"id":825875,"date":"2026-07-25T20:30:27","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T20:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/825875\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T20:30:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T20:30:27","slug":"some-of-p-e-i-s-oldest-cemeteries-are-slowly-being-lost-to-the-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/825875\/","title":{"rendered":"Some of P.E.I.’s oldest cemeteries are slowly being lost to the sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Some of Prince Edward Island\u2019s oldest cemeteries are increasingly at risk as coastal erosion eats away at the land beneath burial grounds that date back more than two centuries.<\/p>\n

Provincial archaeologist Christian Th\u00e9riault said the pioneer cemeteries at Panmure Island and St. Andrew\u2019s Point, both in eastern P.E.I., are among the most vulnerable. <\/p>\n

He estimated that the landform they sit on has retreated by about 30 metres since the 1930s at both locations.<\/p>\n

“They’re both very close to the edge. You can see parts of the cemetery collapsing,” Th\u00e9riault said. “They\u2019ve been actively eroding.”<\/p>\n

Both cemeteries were established by Scottish settlers, and most of the burials date back to the 1800s.<\/p>\n

At the Panmure Island cemetery, Th\u00e9riault said, its first known burial was a young girl who died while crossing to the island in winter and froze from the cold.<\/p>\n

St. Andrew\u2019s Point’s earliest known burial is from 1799. A man from Scotland was buried there.<\/p>\n

Over the decades, storms have taken a toll on both sites. Th\u00e9riault said parts of the cemeteries have already been lost to erosion, along with some of the original burials.<\/p>\n

The province has tried different shoreline protection measures at the two sites.<\/p>\n

\"AProvincial archaeologist Christian Th\u00e9riault says measures like shoreline protections around pioneer cemeteries have been put in place, but these efforts can only delay the ongoing loss of land to coastal erosion. (Shane Hennessey\/CBC)<\/p>\n

At Panmure Island, crews installed a “living shoreline” in 2023 using natural materials designed to stabilize the coast.<\/p>\n

“There’s a lot of shrubs that have been growing, like where we put all the hay bales, like bayberries. That seems to be protecting the shoreline there,” Th\u00e9riault said.<\/p>\n

“Sediments and seaweeds have been building up and shrubs have been starting to grow.”<\/p>\n

The height of the shoreline at St. Andrew\u2019s Point, combined with an existing armour stone wall nearby, made the natural approach impossible, Th\u00e9riault said. Instead, a sandstone wall was built last winter in hopes of holding back the waves.<\/p>\n

‘We’re just delaying’<\/p>\n

The measures appear to be working against regular erosion so far, Th\u00e9riault said, but they have yet to face an event on the scale of post-tropical storm Fiona, which devastated the Island in 2022.<\/p>\n

“We\u2019re just delaying,” he said.<\/p>\n

He added that rising sea levels around P.E.I. combined with increasingly powerful storms are accelerating coastal erosion.<\/p>\n

\"AAt St. Andrew\u2019s Point pioneer cemetery, a sandstone wall was built last winter as a shoreline protection measure. (Submitted by Christian Th\u00e9riault)<\/p>\n

Matt McNeill, a senior adviser of strategic initiatives with P.E.I.\u2019s Department of Land and Environment, agrees that nothing along the coastline is permanent.<\/p>\n

“Coastal erosion on P.E.I.is a natural process. It\u2019s what provides the sand for our beautiful beaches,” he said.<\/p>\n

“But we do recognize that it can be a hazard to P.E.I., particularly when we place infrastructure or people within its path.”<\/p>\n

McNeill said gradual erosion has always been part of the Island\u2019s landscape.<\/p>\n

“But what we see with climate change, and particularly in some large storm events like Hurricane Fiona, we can see really rapid rates of coastal erosion, kind of in the course of a day.”<\/p>\n

Hundreds of archaeological sites already affected<\/p>\n

Across the Island, Th\u00e9riault estimated about 300 archaeological sites are either eroding or have already been lost to the sea. Those include the Panmure Island and St. Andrew\u2019s Point cemeteries.<\/p>\n

About 62 per cent are Indigenous pre-contact sites, 31 per cent are historic sites, and about seven per cent contain both pre-contact and historic components, he said.<\/p>\n

In some places, the only realistic option has been to move human remains before the sea does.<\/p>\n

“There’s been a few projects in the past in West Cape where there’s a marked cemetery that’s being eroded away,” Th\u00e9riault said. <\/p>\n

“The only way to protect it was to do mitigation and move the bodies because \u2026 they’re high sand and gravel terraces that you can’t really put protection measures there.” <\/p>\n

WATCH | Erosion is putting many P.E.I. lighthouses at risk. Here\u2019s what\u2019s being done to save them:\"\"<\/p>\n

Erosion is putting many P.E.I. lighthouses at risk. Here\u2019s what\u2019s being done to save them<\/p>\n

The province says P.E.I.\u2019s changing landscape is putting more than a dozen lighthouses in harm\u2019s way. There are options to protect some of them, but saving others will be more complicated. CBC\u2019s Sheehan Desjardins explains. <\/p>\n

But moving graves is considered a last resort.<\/p>\n

“It would be a very expensive project,” Th\u00e9riault said of Panmure and St. Andrew\u2019s. “There\u2019s also\u2026 a taboo thing about moving [remains] unless we really have to. We prefer not to.”<\/p>\n

Still, if storms keep taking large chunks of those sites, he said the province will have to work with families and local communities to decide whether to exhume and relocate burials further inland.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, provincial staff are monitoring the most threatened sites and urging Islanders to get in touch if they find bones or artifacts after storms.<\/p>\n

“Please contact me and let me know, so we can identify those sites and then try to protect them as well as we can,” Th\u00e9riault said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 5 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":825876,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,44],"class_list":["post-825875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=825875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/825876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=825875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=825875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=825875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}