A GRIEVING family has been left shocked and devastated after a display was allegedly stolen from a couple’s Alderley Edge grave.

Amy Hyland travelled from her Birmingham home to see her family in Wilmslow, and paid a visit to the grave of her father, Ronald Graham Wellens, and her mother, Janet Elizabeth Wellens, on Sunday, November 27.

Once at the cemetery, she noticed that faux ivy, pansies and firs worth £50 had gone missing from her the grave.

After checking to see if it had been moved, Amy came to the conclusion she believed it had been stolen, and cried all the way back home.

She told the Guardian: “My dad was born in Wilmslow and my mum moved there, they lived on Hawthorne Grove all their married, working lives and loved the area.

“We just didn’t think that something like this would happen in Alderley Edge, it’s a nice area with nice people, and we’ve never had any trouble before.

“We put a lot of care into it and spent some money on it, whether they saw that and thought we would just buy a replacement I don’t know.

“I’m still really upset by it. It’s the action of doing it that I can’t get over, it was really heavy and the offender would have needed a car to escape.”

Ronald worked at AstraZenica in Macclesfield as an analytical chemist, while Janet was a geriatrics nurse in Cheadle before working with Marie Curie.

The couple retired in Scotland 11 years ago, before Janet died in 2012, and Ronald passed away a year later.

Amy is struggling to come to terms with how someone could steal from a couple that gave so much to people in the area.

“I just can’t understand why someone would take something from a grieving family and a dead couple,” she said.

“There is no CCTV on the site, so there may be other families who will go through this.

“I just hope whoever did it will see this and understand the story behind what they have taken away from a grieving family.”

Anyone with information should call Cheshire Police on 101, quoting reference number 0716371576.