My wife, Mrs Shubunkin, and I like to visit cemeteries and graveyards. I am conscious that this is an unusual hobby, and a minority interest subject.
Before I met Mrs S, she had written a 14,000-word dissertation on our local cemetery, as part of a heritage management course she’d taken. She’s been offering a significant amount of money for the rights to the manuscript. She isn’t selling.
We like to visit churches on our travels, and the UK is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to churches and cathedrals. When we visit churches, we usually have a look around the churchyard. We also like to visit secular cemeteries.
We have visited graveyards and cemeteries in several countries; in France, the Netherlands, Greece, Türkiye and Australia. Cemeteries are quiet and peaceful places. Next month, we will be staying in an hotel which is situated next to a cemetery. We are going to express a preference for a room on the cemetery side of the building.
I have never felt spooked in a cemetery. I believe there’s more to fear from the living than the dead.
So, what, you may ask, is the interest. It falls into two parts. One is historical. There’s a huge amount of history to discover. And the second part is anthropological; you can tell a lot about a culture by the way it treats its dead.
But sometimes it just nice to sit peacefully on a bench, perhaps eating a ham sandwich and drinking from a flask of tea.