Bournemouth’s most famous (and possibly most crowded) grave contains the last earthly remains of four people who had nothing to do with the place

From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 114.

Early on I discovered a short cut through a wooded cemetery tumbling down a hillside behind St Peter’s Church. One morning, when I stopped to tie a shoelace, I found that I was looking at the grave of Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein and widow of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. I had no idea that she was there, but then few people do. Mary Shelley only went to Bournemouth once, to visit her son who was living there, but she declared a wish to be buried there with her parents, the writer William Godwin and the noted feminist Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – a somewhat odd request since they were long dead and had no connection with the town either. Nonetheless Mary’s son dutifully had their remains brought from London and deposited beside his mother. Someone also tossed in the heart of Percy Bysshe (the only poet named for the sound of a match hitting water), who had drowned off the coast of Italy nearly thirty years before. It was his first visit to Bournemouth, too. So Bournemouth’s most famous (and possibly most crowded) grave contains the last earthly remains of four people who had nothing to do with the place, three of whom never even saw it.

For years all this felt like my little secret – even people in Bournemouth, I found, didn’t know about the grave – but when I passed it now I was interested to see that two bouquets had been laid on the lid, so someone must miss her. A couple of other mourners, lacking flowers, had left empty crisp packets, bless them, while someone else had placed an empty can of Carlsberg lager on the grave of a man named Duckett, who went to a greater reward, according to the inscription, in 1890.