IT once provoked cynics to brand Clitheroe a haven for tree-huggers, but the town's pioneering woodland burial site has now earned respect from an unlikely source.

The decade-old ten-acre site, one of the first in the country, is now considered one of the best in the world and has even become the final resting place of a woman from France.

But its reputation has travelled even further afield, with a visit from a delegation of researchers from Japan.

Husband and wife university lecturers Shiro and Yukako Takeda visited the site in Clitheroe Cemetery as part of a fact-finding mission into the feasibility of starting similar bio-degradable sites in their Oriental homeland.

The couple, lecturers in landscape architecture at Ritsumeikan University, near Kyoto, decided to visit Clitheroe after reading about the burial site on the internet.

The woodland graves are located on the north-west edge of the Waddington Road cemetery, next to the private woodland of Boy Bank Wood.

Woodland burials offer non-denominational interment before trees are planted over the graves to create a haven for local wildlife.

Shiro, 32, said about 97 per cent of bodies were cremated in Japan in line with Buddhist tradition.

He added: "In Japan almost everyone is cremated, but religion isn't a big aspect of it ,so there is plenty of potential for alternatives like woodland burials.

"That's why we came to Clitheroe. We were impressed because it was one of the first places to combine landscape, conservation and burial.

The delegation will visit several more burial sites in the UK before returning to present its findings to the university.

A spokesman for Ribble Valley Council, which maintains the site, said: "When it was first mooted, we were mocked as a bunch of tree-huggers.

"But since then Clitheroe has become the pioneer of this type of burial, with one woman from France even choosing to be buried here. This visit from Japan proves what a success it's been."