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All of these sorrowful mysteries - and many more - are answered in 'A Tomb with a View', a book for anyone who has ever wandered through a field of crooked headstones and wondered about the lives and deaths of those who lie beneath.
There, a dusty, lawyer reads a will (involving some millions of pounds) to an equally sinister family one member of which has were wolf tendencies, another wanders around in a toga of Julius Caesar and a third member is a gentle old lady who plants more than seeds in her flower beds. Sometimes the novels chosen are new, often they are from the backlist and occasionally re-issued from way back. When I walk into town I always walk through the graveyard (as do most folk where I live) – as it avoids walking along the main road. Why is the music hall star who sang ‘I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’ buried on a hillside in Glasgow far from the sound of the silvery sea? Quite a lot, as it happens, because there is always a lot more to say about death, especially in an age like ours which tries to block it out with an ocean of trivia.To the taphophile - a lover of graves- Sheridan’s lair is the equivalent of a rare bird to the twitcher. But empathy gets you the whole story, the kind of story Ross heard from that woman in Devon and which is echoed throughout this engaging book, filled as it is with life, and loss, and love. It also allowed me to look at the tombstones from a perspective of legacies and remembrance they represent. The title to be read and discussed is sign-posted and on sale for the whole of the previous month (with a discount for those who make it known they intend to come) and everybody is welcome, whether first-timer, part-timer or regular-timer. There’s a lot of history in these pages, as there has to be: the story of London’s ‘Magnificent Seven cemeteries’, from the ‘Victorian Valhalla’ of Kensal Green to Marx’s Highgate haven, demands it.
Mr Ross tells stories that are not just moving, inspiring and respectful, but show that while graveyards may hold the dead, they hold a record of the living, and preserve the story of a community in a very special and unique way. A tomb with a view brings to live so many aspects of history that might easily be forgotten; inconspicuous tomb stones can have a wealth of fascinating information about the past behind them. Ian Parsons has spent several years living permanently in Extremadura and now splits his time between his native county of Devon and his beloved vulture landscape, where he leads bird tours introducing people to the birds and the area he clearly loves. These physical and visceral tributes, alongside later projects, such as Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old and Sam Mendes’ 1917, brought the insanity of ‘the war to end all wars’ to the forefront of 21 st century minds. I read A Tomb With A View every weekend morning throughout October, sitting on the couch next to my husband, reading bits out to him, and at one point exclaiming (it was during the Cedar chapter - let’s just say I’m very glad we visited Highgate Cemetery when we did).Peter Ross speaks most of the time of the big Victorian graveyards and their history, and if you ever went to Edinburgh I guess you visited Greyfriars (best in the rain). From the women from Wigtown who were tied to stakes and drowned for refusing to give up their Protestant faith to Hannah Twinnoy, who lies in a grave in Malmesbury Abbey and who became the first person in England to be killed by a tiger. I have experienced first-hand the knowledge of public engagement manager Janine Marriott, as she provided a tour during the fourteenth edition of the Death, Dying and Disposal conference that is held biennially. One I was familiar with was the connection a grave in Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh has with JK Rowling and the Harry Potter character Tom Riddle. Il mio problema è il contenuto che ha deciso di raccontare per ogni cimitero: non ha sempre scelto i personaggi più importanti, o le caratteristiche peculiari di un luogo.
It is about the dead but full of life, telling the stories of the inhabitants, in glorious technicolour. Going into this I’d hoped I’d learn more about the symbols on gravestones and what they tell us, but this book was more a journalistic overview in which the author visited lots of graveyards and discussed death with people there. Peter Ross spent some considerable time travelling across Britain and Ireland wandering round graveyards, talking to those who visit them, those who work in them, going on tours and gathering stories as he went. This shows the wealth of books about death, dying and the dead; you can spend years reading about these topics and never encounter a single place for burial.Peter Ross has been fascinated by graveyards since he was young, tracing the letters and symbols of tombstones in the Old Town Cemetery in Stirling, near his grandparents’ home and reading the slabs like ‘shelves full of stories’. There's lots of interesting history and characters, making this a deeply human and thought-provoking book. Peter Ross certainly visits many graveyards, paying homage to those who were famous, or infamous, in their own time but who are largely forgotten now. What is striking and surprising, however, is the way in which a book such as this is also life-affirming.
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