The Cemetery

I'm sure by now you've realised that this really is an interest of mine- I like walking round really old church yards and cemeteries.
My very favourite is in Cathays in Cardiff.
I really love the victorian grave markers- prior to the victorians, you rarely marked graves because it was expensive and because families were huge. you get the odd lord/lady/MP/Knight/Reverend etc but otherwise not a whole lot.
I like medieval headstones (With the scull and crossed bones) because of their simplicity, but the victorians really went to town. They know how to mark a resting place.

They really started our morbid fascination with death- but whilst we see it as a very taboo subject, they were reasonably open about it- I suppose death was something people saw first had more often, and it was just an accepted part of life (now we go to every length to avoid even looking our age, let alone thinking that our lives won't go on forever just because we bought the worlds most expensive face cream..)
The markers the victorians used were a sign of respect, but also wealth and status. The markers were used to convey something about the person (E.g cut off columns show a life cut off in it's prime, Virgin mary's for mothers lost in childbirth, Anchors for sailor and lots of poetry to show exactly how devout the person was in religious terms)
The other thing I like is that they will often try and tell you that person's life story(- There was a brilliant one in Bradbury upon Avon which tells of a woman being mauled to death by an escaped circus tiger) They use their nicknames or just give you more than their years of birth and death.