A NURSE and a surgeon, legal experts, sailors, soldiers and a bishop all figured in a guided walk around Ulverston cemetery designed to reveal the stories behind the stones.

Interesting facts about the lives, the careers and often the unusual deaths of Ulverston people through the decades had been researched by Rod White as part of the town's WalkFest.

Mr White, a retired teacher, has already held walks or talks on the stories behind the stones at Barrow and Dalton cemeteries and at Ireleth and Walney churchyards.

All the material he has discovered, with the help of old newspapers and archives at Barrow Record Office, is due to appear soon on a website which has won funding from the microgrant programme of the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The second of two Ulverston Cemetery walks was led by Mr White on Sunday, starting from the impressive monument to the memory of Dr Thomas Watkins Wilson.

He was born in Edinburgh around 1812 and was buried there following his death in 1897.

However, he was a visitor to Conishead Priory for 15 years and clearly held the Ulverston district in high regard.

The marble monument, thought to be designed by Richard Affleck, is a scale model of a lighthouse and was once lit by gas.

A memorial stone erected in 2014 names Doris Tyson, a 19-year-old Ulverston nurse who was trapped in a basement shelter at Manchester with 13 others when it took a direct hit during an air-raid on June 2 in 1941.

Another victim of the Second World War was Lt Peter Hague who was killed serving with the Royal Navy during the Battle of Malta in 1942.

The lives of many of those to feature in the walk had been claimed by water - everything from swimming sessions which went wrong to ships lost at sea.

One monument recalls three deaths in January 1880 of teenagers Henry Tyson, Margaret Crewdson and William Boundy in a skating adcident on Ulverston canal.

Among prominent town figures to be buried at Ulverston were Furness coroner John Poole, solicitor Stephen Hart Jackson and Free Church of England Bishop, the Reverend William Troughton.

Another to feature was Henry Airey, a volunteer soldier with the King's Own, who was killed by an exploding cannon at a training camp in Grange in 1884.

A report of the accident in the Barrow News noted: "The sad intelligence cast a gloom over the camp, and where all had been jollity and good fellowship a short time before was now hushed."