The Upper Burial Ground lies at the top of East Hill, Dartford, and is known as St Edmunds Pleasance. Its name recalls the medieval chapel of St Edmund which formerly stood near its centre. It was Dartford's main burial ground from medieval times until 1857 although some interments seem to have continued in existing graves and vaults until the 1890s.

Most of the gravestones were removed in the 1960s and some were placed along the north and east perimeter walls, leaving just a few table tombs in their original locations. It's not known how many stones didn't survive this exercise, but the number now remaining (around 166) is only a fraction of what was originally there.

Ownership of the burial ground was transferred from the parish church (Holy Trinity) to Dartford Council in 1904 and laid out as an open space.

Since only a tiny handful of gravestones now remain at Holy Trinity churchyard in the centre of the town, those at St Edmunds Pleasance form the bulk of what survive for the parish prior to the mid-19th century.

Of note is the Martyrs Memorial which commemorates some local 16th century protestant martyrs. This was first erected in 1851 and after falling into ruin was restored in 1888.

A modern plaque commemorating the steam pioneer Richard Trevithick (d.1833) can be found on the southern wall of the burial ground. He was not given a gravestone at the time.

The gravestone inscriptions in St Edmunds Pleasance have been recorded on at least four occasions:

1. Published by John Dunkin in his book ‘History & Antiquities of Dartford' (1844), pp.417-34. His arrangement is alphabetical by surname, with details abbreviated to names/dates & relationships. Occasionally the information from two gravestones relating to the same family is conflated into the same entry and/or other biographical detail added. There are some omissions and errors in his listing, and there's no numbering or plot plan. He noted that the earliest gravestone was dated 1696, but this no longer survives and the earliest now is probably that of Thomas & Ann Stubbs. This carried the dates 1741 and 1763 (Ref. N23), though these are no longer legible. Dunkin himself died in 1846 and was also laid to rest in the burial ground.

2. A selective listing made by the Lewisham antiquarian Leland Duncan in June 1877, one of many he produced for churchyards in west Kent. He entered full details of just 29 gravestones into a notebook, and he evidently recorded only a small proportion of the stones then surviving. His notebook was eventually deposited in the library of the Kent Archaeological Society along with his other transcripts. Again there's no plot plan.

3. The third listing is a five-page typescript from 1908 held at the library of the Society of Genealogists in London, described in the catalogue as "Dartford MI's". The transcriber's name is given in the catalogue as "Hall Crouch". It also covers memorials in the church and churchyard, but is selective & highly abbreviated.

4. A new transcript of all the surviving memorials was compiled by Stephen Archer in 2012-13 with the aid of digital camera photographs. By this time many of the stones were highly weathered making them difficult to read. The photos were uploaded to FindaGrave in October 2021.

The details from each stone have been checked, and in many cases clarified, by comparing with the J. Dunkin, L. Duncan, and Hall Crouch transcripts, and also with Dartford parish burial register.

From 1857 the bulk of the town's burials took place at the newly opened East Hill Cemetery, further out from the town centre with its frontage along East Hill and The Brent.