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A Tomb With a View: The Stories and Glories of Graveyards: Scottish Non-fiction Book of the Year 2021

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Enter a grave new world in this acclaimed book as Peter Ross uncovers the stories and glories of graveyards. Not just of lives lost, but of graveyards as a place of solace and a place to retreat to when parks became so crowded as to mitigate against social distancing. Moving, warm and redemptive, it's a sort of travelogue - we are transported to remote Scottish island burying grounds via the bustle and crush of east London to the forgotten resting places of soldiers who fell in the first world war. Remembering the dead is key, for then, they become people again, suffused with personality and history, mute vessels for love and longing. Uncovering those histories has been something that has captivated Peter Ross and in A Tomb With a View, he finds the stories of the people who inhabit graveyards and the people that still care about them.

I am slightly surprised that he didn’t go to Brookwood Cemetery, the enormous place of rest just outside Woking; it is quite awe-inspiring walking around there; it does get a mention though. The final chapter of A Tomb with a View discusses Arnos Vale, a cemetery in Bristol, England and one that I am quite familiar with, as I lived next door in Bath for four years. In his absorbing book about the lost and the gone, Peter Ross takes us from Flanders Fields to Milltown to Kensal Green, to melancholy islands and surprisingly lively ossuaries.

Prior to reading this book, I had not pondered that once the idea of resurrection started to be doubted, cremation took off, which caused certain cemeteries to decay.

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. There are touching stories too, a love story of a couple who lived for 80 years and had 12 children and who died within hours of each other; one could not exist without the other. 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. Ross notes that Arnos Vale is not only a site for burial, it has proven to be a popular wedding location as well.

I have been to the ossuary mentioned in the Czech Republic; so, I found the section on ossuaries and charnel houses to be quite fascinating. But overall it is the way he looks at these cemeteries as once more parts of communities and as places we visit that is what makes his book so much more - it is hard to believe that barely a decade or two ago, most of the grand Victorian necropolis's, including Highgate, were largely no-go areas, ruinous, filthy, the haunt of drug addicts and the homeless. In these spots were buried those the Catholic Church would not allow to be buried in consecrated ground such as unbaptised infants, women who died in childbirth, and those who had taken their own lives.

He moves along a non-linear path, from accounts of loneliness and mental illness to encounters with religious tension – including the burial of murdered Irish journalist Lyra McKee. Ross reads his own words well in this tale of the history of mortality in the UK and Ireland, focusing on the stories of the deceased or their resting places. You will not easily pass by the forgotten graves of unbaptised children in Ireland; graves which had to be dug by their parents because the church would have nothing to do with them. Enter a grave new world of fascination and delight as award-winning journalist Peter Ross uncovers the stories and glories of graveyards. In the book we learn about forgotten figures like Lilias Adie, an elderly Scot who was imprisoned as a witch in Fife in 1704.As the evening progresses someone turns to extreme measures to ensure their inheritance and one-by-one the bodies begin to pile up.

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