The Stories and Glories of Graveyards
By Peter Ross
Published by Headline on 3 September 2020
I love graveyards and churchyards and have done ever since I can remember. I always stop and visit whenever I can, and I am lucky to live five minutes away from a beautiful Norman foundation stone-built church, with a very full churchyard. All of life and death is there, from deaths in infancy to deaths in extreme old age, deaths from accidents, illness, tragedy or war, and the same is true for most burial places.
Peter Ross has produced an absorbing book based on his own extensive experiences of visiting burial places across Britain and Ireland, telling the stories of those buried there, those who study them, those who continue to visit the graveyards and why they do so. I found huge amounts in these pages to interest me.
One would think there is a certain equality in death, but that is definitely not the case. The poor were usually buried without memorials or only very modest ones, whereas the rich could afford opulent, exotic and extremely costly burials in prestigious London cemeteries with equally expensive memorials erected in due course.
Whether your interests lie in the Goth culture at Whitby, Commonwealth War Grave Commission's invaluable work, burials in tiny parish churches, town cemeteries or huge war cemeteries, the burials of the famous and the infamous, the barely-remembered or the never to be forgotten characters of history or stardom, the odds are that Peter Ross has already thought of it and covered it in this remarkable book.
I particularly liked the story of the gentleman who practised his bagpipes in his local graveyard as there was nowhere else suitable to go during the Coronavirus lock-down, but found myself perturbed by those who thought practising golf in a graveyard was acceptable, safe or in any way a good idea. The Rothwell Charnel Chapel was one of my favourites, as was the section about Arnos Vale cemetery in Bristol, where couples choose to get married in the chapel.....
Fascinating stuff!
Many thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for allowing me to read the book in return for an honest and unbiased review.
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