LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING The cemetery lies 300m west of the grounds to the Haslar Royal Naval Hospital and is a flat, irregularly shaped enclosure of c5.3 hectares. It is bounded by a hawthorn hedge on the edge of Stoke Lake to the north, by an inlet from the lake to the east, walls to the south and by C20 housing to the west.
ENTRANCES AND APPROACHES The principal approach to the cemetery is from the east along Clayhall Road, which bounds the southern side of the site. On this side the cemetery has a brick wall, approximately 1.5m high, with regular buttresses and brick copings. The walls curve inwards to create a wide entranceway with substantial brick gate piers with stone dressings and caps, and iron gates. There is a pedestrian entrance at the western end of the wall, adjacent to the cottage which originally formed a sexton’s lodge.
PRINCIPAL BUILDING A chapel of rest, 1859, listed at Grade II (NHLE 1427736), stands directly north of the main entrance. It is a compact, gothic building in red and blue brick, with a heavily-moulded Norman-style arched doorway on the southern side, facing the cemetery entrance. LANDSCAPED GROUNDS The cemetery has a series of straight, tree-lined paths aligned roughly north-south and east-west, dividing the site into a series of quadrangles; all are laid to grass. Most of these are open, with individual burial plots, typically with military or naval headstones of varying styles laid out in rows, varying in orientation in different sections of the cemetery.
The different sections of the cemetery group the headstones related to certain campaigns, and the eastern section contains c1,400 Commonwealth War Grave Commission memorials to lives lost in the First and Second World Wars. There is a large group of late-C19 graves with uniform headstones to the north-west of the chapel, including a group of unusual cruciform headstones with bronze plaques dating from the early C20. The south-eastern quadrangles contain individual monuments from the mid-C19 onwards.
In the north-west section of the cemetery there is an enclosure for the burial of Turkish sailors; it has low brick walls surmounted by iron railings, with an access gate on its southern side. In c1900 the remains of 26 sailors who died from cholera whilst anchored off the Hardway, Gosport in 1850 were re-interred at Clayhall Cemetery having been moved from their original graves in the hospital grounds. There is a sign on the overthrow of the gate stating ‘TÜRK DENIZ SEHITLIGI / TURKISH NAVAL CEMETERY / 1850’, which may have been moved from the hospital grounds.
There are a number of large monuments dedicated to various conflicts and tragedies: that to HMS Eurydice is listed at Grade II* (NHLE ref 1428092) and commemorates the worst naval disaster in peacetime, when a sail training vessel foundered off the Isle of Wight in 1878 with the loss of 317 lives. Its memorial has the original ship’s anchor set into the top of a moulded rock formation. The perils of submariners are recorded in two obelisks and a screen memorial (NHLE refs 1428094, 1428138 and 1428144), and there is an obelisk commemorating the campaign of the HMS Boadicea in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 (NHLE ref 1428142); all are listed at Grade II. To the west of the main entrance is the Cross of Sacrifice, designed by Sir Reginald Blomfeld, erected in 1926.
Behind a Cross of Sacrifice is a rectangular pit with evenly sloping sides, rumoured to relate to an early brick works or gravel extraction for the paths.
The cemetery has a number of mature trees, particularly to the east of the site. Within the Turkish Burial Ground topiary yews are maintained.