Struggled to find a particularly interesting photo once I got to the end of the day, but this one will do, with its frisky dogs and imposing architecture. This is the church of Waltham Abbey, in Essex, where I happened to find myself for the afternoon. The last of all the great monasteries of England to succumb to the corporate raiding of Henry VIII in 1540. The church still stands, but all the rest of it is just ruined old walls and gravestones.
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.
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.
Snow was forecast and duly arrived, though it was hardly a winter apocalypse. It did make the town look good, though. This graveyard sits on the hillside across the valley from my house: it takes a long zoom to pick it out in a photo and, usually it’s all rather brown and unprominent. But I like the way the snow picks out the headstones, like rim-light, almost.
A lush scene for Christmas Eve, particularly after yesterday. The cemetery on top of Balgay Hill in Dundee was a real discovery of the day. Just one of its memorial stones is pictured here but this is a huge necropolis, backed by the Firth of Tay, the hills on the far side of which are just visible here. A very un-Decemberish shot, but that’s why I’ve picked it. For tomorrow, Happy Christmas…
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.
St. Bartholomew’s Church in Ripponden is a fine looking building in its way, and its graveyard an atmospheric and photogenic spot — but someone really needs to cut the grass.
This little graveyard perches on the hillside, across the valley from my house. With a powerful enough pair of binoculars, it might even be possible to see this diorama from our bedroom window. But until today, it had gone unseen. There’s nothing else to do but explore these nearby hidden corners.
It’s my birthday tomorrow, meaning today’s post marks the end of a ninth complete year of this blog. Am I feeling morbid? Not particularly, I just thought this grave (in Bunhill Fields, London) was kinda cute actually. The hair is getting greyer but I am still an old Goth at heart.
As I approach 50, my thoughts are filled with premonitions of death…. so I like to hang around cemeteries. Believe as much of that sentence as you wish. I suspect Abe didn’t stick around for long in this world, but his gravestone is still there. One day though, probably the ivy will take over.
Being 42 