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Some of Prince Edward Island’s oldest cemeteries are increasingly at risk as coastal erosion eats away at the land beneath burial grounds that date back more than two centuries.
Provincial archaeologist Christian Thériault said the pioneer cemeteries at Panmure Island and St. Andrew’s Point, both in eastern P.E.I., are among the most vulnerable.
He estimated that the landform they sit on has retreated by about 30 metres since the 1930s at both locations.
“They’re both very close to the edge. You can see parts of the cemetery collapsing,” Thériault said. “They’ve been actively eroding.”
Both cemeteries were established by Scottish settlers, and most of the burials date back to the 1800s.
At the Panmure Island cemetery, Thériault said, its first known burial was a young girl who died while crossing to the island in winter and froze from the cold.
St. Andrew’s Point’s earliest known burial is from 1799. A man from Scotland was buried there.
Over the decades, storms have taken a toll on both sites. Thériault said parts of the cemeteries have already been lost to erosion, along with some of the original burials.
The province has tried different shoreline protection measures at the two sites.
At Panmure Island, crews installed a “living shoreline” in 2023 using natural materials designed to stabilize the coast.
“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,” Thériault said.
“Sediments and seaweeds have been building up and shrubs have been starting to grow.”
The height of the shoreline at St. Andrew’s Point, combined with an existing armour stone wall nearby, made the natural approach impossible, Thériault said. Instead, a sandstone wall was built last winter in hopes of holding back the waves.
‘We’re just delaying’
The measures appear to be working against regular erosion so far, Thériault said, but they have yet to face an event on the scale of post-tropical storm Fiona, which devastated the Island in 2022.
“We’re just delaying,” he said.
He added that rising sea levels around P.E.I. combined with increasingly powerful storms are accelerating coastal erosion.
Matt McNeill, a senior adviser of strategic initiatives with P.E.I.’s Department of Land and Environment, agrees that nothing along the coastline is permanent.
“Coastal erosion on P.E.I.is a natural process. It’s what provides the sand for our beautiful beaches,” he said.
“But we do recognize that it can be a hazard to P.E.I., particularly when we place infrastructure or people within its path.”
McNeill said gradual erosion has always been part of the Island’s landscape.
“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.”
Hundreds of archaeological sites already affected
Across the Island, Thériault estimated about 300 archaeological sites are either eroding or have already been lost to the sea. Those include the Panmure Island and St. Andrew’s Point cemeteries.
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.
In some places, the only realistic option has been to move human remains before the sea does.
“There’s been a few projects in the past in West Cape where there’s a marked cemetery that’s being eroded away,” Thériault said.
“The only way to protect it was to do mitigation and move the bodies because … they’re high sand and gravel terraces that you can’t really put protection measures there.”
The province says P.E.I.’s changing landscape is putting more than a dozen lighthouses in harm’s way. There are options to protect some of them, but saving others will be more complicated. CBC’s Sheehan Desjardins explains.
But moving graves is considered a last resort.
“It would be a very expensive project,” Thériault said of Panmure and St. Andrew’s. “There’s also… a taboo thing about moving [remains] unless we really have to. We prefer not to.”
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.
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.
“Please contact me and let me know, so we can identify those sites and then try to protect them as well as we can,” Thériault said.
