A 'DIY funeral' expert has been promoting alternative ways of burying a loved one in East Lancashire.

Josefine Speyer, founder and director of the National Death Centre, visited the West Pennine Remembrance Park in Turton to put forward new ideas in a push to liberate funerals from conventional traditions.

These, she said, can include cleaning the corpse yourself, encasing it in a cardboard coffin and even burials in your back garden.

These may seem a little unsettling, but Josefine, 51, who was born in Germany, believes conventional funerals can not only be inappropriate but offensive.

She said: "People I have met have been very upset by conventional funerals.

"They feel it is disempowering to have control of the funeral taken away from them.

"The funeral directors are not always good as they should be, the priest can forget the name. There is a growing number of people who do not want that kind of funeral."

Hence Josefine's concept of the DIY funeral.

This, she said, is her way of making people aware of their rights when a relative dies.

"You can do everything yourself," she said.

This means you can wash the body yourself, if it is in hospital, you can arrange your own transport to cold storage and can visit it as many times as you like - there's "no rush", said Josefine.

Furthermore, she said, you can choose what sort of coffin you like from a growing range.

Environmentally-friendly ones include cardboard, chipboard, papier-mch and wicker coffins.

Josefine also said that burying a loved one in your garden is a viable option.

Planning permission is not strictly necessary although it is wise to check with the Environment Agency in case the water table is affected.

Tragically, Josefine is speaking from personal experience about home burials as her husband, Nicholas Albery, who was a psychotherapist and founder of the Natural Death Centre, was killed. He was buried in their back garden in an alternative ceremony.

Josefine said that as well as being ecologically sound DIY funerals can be loving, even happy occasions.

She said: "You can have more involvement of the family, it can be religious or non-religious, but will be a celebration of life where people can speak spontaneously if they want to.

"It can be a truly beautiful thing."