Tag Archives: grave

Jan 12 2025
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Daily Post, Landscape

Resting in peace, on St Helena

Sunday 12th January 2025, 10.55am (day 4,889)

Grave and the Peaks, 12/1/25

I wasn’t flying from Cape Town back home, in case you were wondering, but instead to St Helena, for my fourth visit. Who can ever say these things for sure, but it’s possibly my last — put it this way, it’s the last, for now, for which I have the money, or rather, for which someone else has given me the money, in this case the British Academy (to whom thanks are due).

Whomever resides in this particular spot these days has definitely made their last visit to this remote little island, though. There are worse places to spend eternity.

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Jan 01 2025
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Daily Post, Landscape

Stone coffins and Morecambe Bay

Tuesday 31st December 2024, 10.45am (day 4,877)

Stone coffins, 31/12/24

There was a New Year’s Eve party tonight but none of the pictures taken there really worked, and so let’s end 2024 on what might be an overly morbid note. But I do like the row of old stone-cut graves that sit above Morecambe Bay near St Patrick’s church, Heysham. And the designer of the cover of The Best of Black Sabbath must have liked them too. That photo is better than mine (I’m not even close to getting the horizon straight, and don’t care), but my excuse is that I was stood above them in the most revolting wind and rain; 2024, at least in the UK, really didn’t bow out with great weather.

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May 13 2024
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Hudson Janisch’s memorial

Sunday 12th May 2024, 10.50am (day 4,644)

One wonders if the social and economic landscape of St Helena would be different had it been run more often in its history by St Helenians. In the centuries since it was formally colonised, only two of the many Governors have been born on the island, and it’s perhaps significant that one of these, Hudson Janisch gets himself by far the most impressive memorial of any Governor. On the lowest level of this three-tier stone (not pictured) is inscribed: “This monument is erected by the inhabitants to commemorate the high respect and esteem in which their late Governor was universally held.” As a memorial, that’s pretty good, I think.

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Apr 03 2023
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Daily Post, Urban scene

Vertical cemetery

Monday 3rd April 2023, 2.40pm (day 4,239)

Vertical cemetery, 3/4/23

On the hill of Montjuïc, which rises between Barcelona’s city centre and the port, there is the site of the 1992 Olympics, much of it feeling rather neglected these days. When we first saw this place my initial thought was that it was something to do with the Olympic village, rows of concrete blocks with what seemed like dark windows in them, all looking strangely moody. Closer inspection revealed why: in fact they were these mausoleums, piled on top of each other like apartments arranged into streets and avenues, with stepladders here and there so families can reach the highest. I’ve never seen anything quite like this before except, to some extent, at Novodevichy in Moscow, but even that doesn’t quite reach this level of stacking.

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Aug 21 2022
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Daily Post, Urban scene

Rippleside cemetery

Saturday 20th August 2022, 12.50pm (day 4,013)

Rippleside Cemetery, 20/8/22

Barking is one of the least gentrified bits of London, not that that is a bad thing. It also gives extremely good graveyard, as I discovered when getting away from the traffic noise and finding myself in the huge necropolis that is Rippleside cemetery, seeming to stretch away for miles, a vast city of memorials to those who have ‘passed on’ and ‘fallen asleep’. Or, here with the three members of the Sanderson family, taken out by (I assume) German bombers one night in January 1941.

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Mar 22 2022
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Anwoth Old Kirk (Wicker Man reference)

Monday 21st March 2022, 1.45pm (day 3,861)

Anwoth Old Kirk

A brief stopover on the way home from Newton Stewart. If I was filming a classic 1970s British horror movie in the Dumfries and Galloway region, and I wanted an abandoned church as a location, I’d come and use Anwoth’s, just as did the makers of The Wicker Man. (See this page.)

11 different locations in 11 days — Manchester, Burnley, Brighouse, Mytholmroyd, Leeds, Hebden Bridge, Huddersfield, Carlisle, Polbae, Glen Trool and Anwoth. That’s the second time there’s been such a long run of variation in place.

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