To the Cemetery

Thank God for PBS, otherwise my brain would probably go to mush. Quite enjoyable (and timely) programme on last night. A Cemetery Special was a documentary about one of my favourite places - graveyards.

I always try to make a point of visiting old burying grounds whenever I travel; I've enjoyed the sprawling grounds of Highgate Cemetery in London and Père-Lachaise in Paris as much as those of tiny parish churches. The American sites visited for the show last night really were cemeteries, though - the nineteenth-century, rural garden-style type, full of marble statues of angels and sleeping figures - rather than graveyards. There are comparatively few graveyards in North America - we're just not old enough - though I visited several recently in Boston. And not forgetting the Old Burying Ground in Halifax, which dates mostly from the eighteenth century and has beautiful headstones.

But I digress. The show on PBS last night visited a sampling of cemeteries across America. Most interesting were Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta (which I visited nearly twenty years ago with my grandmother, who is herself very interested in old burial grounds), and Mount Auburn in Boston (which I have not yet visited, but which I've read a fair bit about). But oddly absent, I thought, were some of the cemeteries of New Orleans. In the wake of the devastation there, it's a shame it wasn't included.