An eight-year-old boy died and two 10-year-olds were taken to hospital when stone from a large, old memorial fell on them while they played in Craigton cemetery and crematorium, Glasgow, on the evening of 26 May.

According to reports, the boys entered the cemetery through a damaged wall and climbed trees. They jumped down from a tree on to a gravestone, which “wobbled and fell over”. One boy said: “It had a triangle bit at the top and it fell off and hit [the deceased boy] in the face and me in the back, too.”

It was after two youngsters were killed in separate incidents by falling headstones that questions were raised in the UK Parliament about the safety of memorials and councils all over the country starting laying gravestones flat and strapping them to wooden stakes. They were told to stop doing it by the Government Ministry of Justice in 2009.