Cemeteries and graveyards

This has got to be a 100% dis subject, I’d be surprised if it hasn’t been done before.

I was in Hammersmith cemetery yesterday, a nice place for a Sunday afternoon. Tell me about your favourite cemetery, points on offer as usual for the more obscure ones and not just Pere Lachaise.

What do you want to happen to your mortal coil when death takes you wherever it takes you?

I met Eric in one once and saw a squirrel do a backflip.

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what a day

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Burn baby burn

ash?

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Oh as to my wishes - I would like any organs that are deemed suitable donated to other humans as required, the rest of me burnt and the ashes fired out of a cannon as “I couldn’t say it to your face” by Arthur Russell is played in the background.

I’m happy to be harvested for spares and then chucked in a skip, or whatever the cheapest means of disposal is.

Obviously, growing up round there, it’s Highgate. The West Side cemetery, which is older and only available to view on a tour, is bloody incredible.


Hard to see really but when you walk through that passage it opens out into a ring of tombs on either side and in the centre of the ring is a huge tree. (Click through to the ‘Google Earth’ version to see the overhead.)

The East Side has Karl Marx’s grave, comrades. What’s not to like?

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Taxidermied then propped up in centre midfield on the next DiS Amsterdam trip

Some sort of joke about being more mobile than last year

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That’s a good map, Theo

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X marx the spot ahahahahahahah

Quit Stalin for time and go and visit.

used to live round the corner from the closed down St Clements hospital. We’d sometimes go for a walk around the abandoned adjoining graveyard, which was pretty creepy at night.

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I did NOT expect a fingering story in this thread, it’s like something out of Scout’s diaries!

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Two graveyard stories:

  • When I was staying at my dad’s house a few months ago, I decided to try to find the memorial stone laid for my mum when she died. I’d never visited it - partly because I couldn’t face it, and partly because I’ve never really seen much significance in a memorial stone. Anyhow, I couldn’t find the stone, and I wrecked my trainers looking for it.
  • My stepmum was buried a couple of months ago. Although it was a hard day, the burial was weirdly lovely. The churchyard (a different churchyard to my mum’s) is adjacent to the village primary school, and as we walked out we could hear the sound of the children playing at breaktime. We sang the hymn How Great Thou Art, and the sun came out through the trees as we reached the final verse. My daughter held on to my dad’s waist as we sang.

Highgate is obviously pretty cool, but there are a lot round me which I assume is some sort of late Victorian / early 20th century overspill, moving out into the suburbs when there was still land available. Nunhead, Camberwell and Brockley & Ladywell are all pretty massive and not far from each other.

Most interesting / favourite is the churchyard of a church just outside the village where my parents live - it’s essentially abandoned (maybe one service a year to keep it consecrated?), hasn’t really been used since 1850, and because there were no Victorian improvements, it’s retained a tonne of pre-Reformation features. It’s basically on its own in the middle of some fields so pretty cool. The graveyard includes a few which have skulls and crossbones on them because apparently they’re the graves of pirates who washed up on the beach down the road:

http://glamorganhistoryandarchaeology.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/st-brynachs-church_27.html

Don’t like them.

The Glasgow necropolis is good for a wander

In 2015, I took a Saving Private Ryan style pilgrimage to the town of Bethune to commemorate the death of my Great Great Uncle who died on the battlefields during the First World War in 1915. Whilst at school, we had been given a project to research and find out the history behind a fallen solider. I picked my relative and going through the genealogical process was fascinating, all these finds really stuck with me so it had always been my intention to go and pay my respects one day. So on one cold October morning, I lay a flower, took a moment and snapped a picture. Will dig out the photo and post it at some point but here’s the cemetery, this was the section for the war dead attached to the main town one.

Also when I visited Nova Scotia, I went to the Fairview Cemetry where one hundred and twenty one victims of the Titanic sinking are buried. Saw the grave marked with that’s marked J. Dawson though it’s for a Joseph Dawson, not Jack.