When did you last visit a graveyard?Some people choose to visit graves as a way of feeling close to famous people. I remember some years ago when my children were younger, and my son wanted to visit the grave of Roald Dahl when were in Great Missenden some years ago, and felt happy that he'd seen it and had a connection with his favourite author at the time.
This BBC article describes the trend for visiting the resting place of famous people.
One of the most famous is the Pére Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors is buried, along with lots of other people of course, such as Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust.
This book was found in Norwich library and provides guidance on how to find the graves of people all over the UK...
There was also an issue when Pokemon Go came out that people may have been entering cemeteries to 'catch them all' and not showing the same respect that they might have been expected to.
Barbara Ellen, writing in the Guardian, suggests that this is nothing new, and that there has been a historic trend for this dark tourism, or thanatourism as it's also called (I've written about it before) for some years.
I also remember when teaching about 20 years ago using a video shot in and around Cairo showing many people living in tombs in the City of Dead.
Last weekend, I visited Cley Contemporary 17 in Cley next the Sea on the Norfolk coast, and there was art in amongst the gravestones, and pathways cut amongst the graves.
So calculations of Rahn's Index are not the only reasons that geographers might be interested in such places.
To finish, why not complete this mission from our first Mission:Explore book....
One for all tapophiles...
Comments