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

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I look at all the headstones and I imagine all the people here, all the stories that are yet to be discovered and told. 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 … a considered and moving book on the timely subject of how the dead are remembered, and how they go on working below the surface of our lives. Good feature writing demands having an eye for detail, an ability to ask tough questions and a certain humility too: the journalist is just a fly on the wall, not omniscient. With rare exceptions such as bank holidays, the book group meets on the first Wednesday of every month at 7. One of my favorite essays in the book introduces an Iranian father who built an exquisite monument to his 11-year-old son in London's poshest cemetery.

These days, it’s the people who hang around graveyards, who openly talk about death, who are intrigued by our attitudes to it, who are the real oddities. It also allowed me to look at the tombstones from a perspective of legacies and remembrance they represent. Ross charts the sad decline and neglect of the great Victorian private cemeteries but shows how many of them have risen again as enthusiastic Friends groups, local councils and others have found ways of preserving them.But it is especially delightful to encounter peaceful green spaces full of wildlife and intriguing personal histories. This is a rambling walk in a whole host of graveyards around the UK from the Victorian London graveyards to the IRA war cemey in Belfast. Enter a grave new world of fascination and delight as award-winning journalist Peter Ross uncovers the stories and glories of graveyards.

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. Peter Ross' journey through the graveyards and cemeteries of Britain, as documented in this book, definitely led to some fascinating stories, both about the living and the dead. Ross brings both MacThomais and Glasnevin to life, delving into his family history and that of the cemetery, artfully interweaving both with tales of Ireland’s wider history. 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.Taphophiles – people who are interested in cemeteries, funerals and gravestones – are an interesting bunch.

But, perhaps this is reminiscent of the chaos that is attributed to the cramped and unplanned nature of many of the cemeteries Ross mentions. These moments lend themselves to an overall feeling of unease - there doesn't seem to be a strong sense of structure. Ritual is important to those with faith too, and Ross spends time with a Muslim funeral director who has to collect a prepare a body for burial the following day so the soul can move on.This soothing novel is a real recommendation not just for tapophiles (lovers of graves), but for everyone. Once you’re away from the main gates, they’re generally quiet and peaceful, with nothing to be heard but birdsong and the wind in the trees.

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. Yet while I say ‘well-known’ examples, we will not know how these cemeteries will be used in the future, and there is always a chance that stories that are part of our communal history will be forgotten.So many stories, from Muslim burials by Britain’s oldest firm of Muslim funeral directors to grand monuments, from Whitby Goths to tiny unmarked graves; each has a story and Ross accords each with the same degree of care and interest. By the third act, there are more corpses than live members left in the cast and what about the sympathetic nurse and the author of romantic novels are they all, or more than, they seem to be? While not a history of cemeteries, the book is full of interesting historical detail about the great Victorian garden cemeteries designed to replace overflowing church graveyards and thus combat the spread of typhus and cholera.