Seven hundred lorry loads of topsoil will be dumped on allotments at Long Sutton in a “bizarre” plan to turn the site into a cemetery.
The project will see 14,000 tonnes of soil shifted to the site off Seagate Road so the dead can be buried 1.1 metres above the water table.
An application from the parish council for a burial ground on the allotments was thrown out three years ago because of the flood risk – so parish councillors went back to South Holland’s planning committee with an application to raise the height of the land by 1.2 metres.
District councillors for Long Sutton Andy Tennant and David Wilkinson opposed the application at South Holland’s planning committee on Wednesday.
But it was given the go-ahead by nine votes to four.
Coun Tennant is the son of former Long Sutton councillor Dennis Tennant, who died last year.
He said: “My late father’s comments on this one were ‘I don’t want to be buried with the cabbages and the cauliflowers’. Fortunately or unfortunately he didn’t live to see the day when there’s a new cemetery on allotments.
Coun Tennant was staggered by the number of lorry loads of soil it will take to make the land ready for burials.
“Somebody’s got to pay for this operation and I know that’s not our decision as planners,” he said. “I think we could be developing a cemetery that’s going to be more difficult to build than the pyramids.”
He said the cemetery application site was too far out of town for most people to visit on foot and there were far better alternative sites in Long Sutton.
Coun Wilkinson said: “I think it’s quite a bizarre thing to do to raise it up.”
Part-time undertaker Coun Elizabeth Sneath was worried the access was not wide enough for hearses.
Committee chairman Roger Gambba-Jones said the first application was rejected on flood risk alone – not the suitability of the site or the access and those issues could not be revisited.
Coun Chris Brewis warned it would be years before anyone could be buried because it would take so long for the ground to settle.
Seven residents, most in Seagate Road, wrote letters of objection to the district council.