People all over the world are dying to get in to cemeteries, to graves, to mausoleums. Their bones are buried, their ashes encased, their lives summarised in the dash between two dates. Their epitaphs, their choice of grave marker, their obituary, all tell a story. Cemeteries are museums of life often overlooked, frequently ignored. When I travel, I travel to meet the living and to pay my respects to the dead. These are my stories.
In the village of Dublin in Sierra Leone sits an old, old cemetery. Like many cemeteries in this part of the world, the headstones have fallen, choked by a jungle…
The DN1, the road between Brașov and Predeal, is littered with hairpin turns, white-knuckle bends that had me channelling my inner Rosemary Smith. I spotted a cemetery off to the…
Hungarian artist Szilvia Fekete is someone I greatly admire. I’m a big fan of her work. A while back, she told me about the hearts in the old cemetery in…
There’s an impressive gate to Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit-run private boarding school for boys in Clane, Co. Kildare. The Jesuits bought the fifteenth-century castle along with 219 acres in…
Back in seventh-century Ireland, a chap who’d later be known as St Finian of Innisfallen, happened upon this part of the world and set up a monastery. Whether he was…
The old cemetery on the grounds of the ruins of Ahamore Abbey on Derrynane beach in Co. Kerry is a beautiful place to be buried. Accessible at low tide, many…
Having failed miserably to locate the old cemetery in Maribor, which is somewhere near the Cathedral, we decided to visit Pobrežje Cemetery instead. A cemetery in three parts, it’s home…
