It likely has the highest cumulative I.Q. of any cemetery in Britain, but the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground remains an oasis of calm, regularly overlooked by residents and tourists alike.

The tiny burial ground just off Huntington Road, near Murray Edwards College, which has been described as “Britain’s brainiest cemetery”, boasts the final resting places of at least seven members of the Order of Merit, three Nobel Prize winners, and over 60 who have entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Now, a University of Cambridge academic is trying to gather support for the preservation of this historic cemetery. Dr Mark Goldie, Fellow of Churchill College and Reader in British Intellectual History, is a founding member of the group ‘Friends of the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground’, which aims to increase local awareness about the wealth of talent buried there.

While the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s grave is the most popular, he shares space with a staggering number of other luminaries. These include his student Elizabeth Anscombe, the physicist John Cockcroft, and the trail-blazing female student Charlotte Scott, the first woman to receive a doctoral degree.

They are, however, just a handful of the incredibly varied inhabitants, who include both town and gown. The cemetery’s charm lies, not only in the romantically decaying atmosphere and the tilting ivy-strewn headstones, which cause visitors to tread carefully, but in the social and scientific developments pioneered by the people commemorated there.

As Dr Goldie explained, “It’s a place that tells the story of Cambridge over the past 150 years: the rise of new disciplines, the struggle of women to be admitted, the opening up to all religions and none.”

He added, “We're constantly making new discoveries. Only the other day, a visitor pointed out that William Halse Rivers, who is buried here, was the father of psychoanalysis and a key character in Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy.”

The former chapel adjacent to the burial ground has now been converted into the studio of letter-cutting artist Eric Marland who serves as its day-to-day custodian. Despite the potentially morbid environment, he claims not to find it remotely macabre.

According to Marland, “I love the fact that people are drawn to the place and the way it connects them – many of the people who visit are on some kind of personal quest.”

Marland has collected an archive of objects left in tribute at Wittgenstein’s grave. These vary from poems and drawings to a small pile of pennies. These tributes suggest that, while it may be experiencing an unusually raised public profile, the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground remains, ultimately, a place of personal contemplation.