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

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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. Then there is Phoebe’s near contemporary, Peter the Wild Boy, who was “found” in a forest in Germany and brought back for the illumination and amusement of the English court. Taphophiles – people who are interested in cemeteries, funerals and gravestones – are an interesting bunch. 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.

Death should not be seen as taboo and cemeteries need to be seen as something beyond the final resting place of those who have gone before us and as something more than places of mourning. We meander from the long lost past, meditating on lives of those still residing in the few remaining charnel houses to the life affirming weddings now taking place in graveyards like Arnos in Bristol. These gardens of death provide ample prompts for both individual life histories as well as large historic events.

The oldest one is the Glendalough monastic site, but Dublin's Glasnevin and Edinburgh's Greyfriars are the most notable ones I touristed upon. 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. 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. The courage and love of the people he speaks to is inspiring and leave the reader with the feeling that death is not something to be feared or hidden, but is very much a part of life.

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 .

These moments lend themselves to an overall feeling of unease - there doesn't seem to be a strong sense of structure. Ross takes us from Flanders Fields to the Victorian garden cemeteries to the divided cemeteries of Belfast and strange ossuaries in Rothwell and Hythe. 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.