I Was Running at the Speed of Life

The cemetery is the closest large public space to where I live and functions like a kind of morbid park. To avoid needlessly having to walk to the bottom of South Street, I tried using GoogleEarth to see if there was a more convenient entrance - I couldn't make out much with its current resolution. Forced outside and handed a beautiful afternoon to waste, I put the camera in my pocket and decided to explore Southward.

I walked East before turning the corner at the shop. There's a fairly steep, tall and green embankment just off South Street that, if one was so inclined, provides a shortcut into the cemetery. However, I was neither in the mood nor appropriate footwear to traverse rusty fences and climb up loose soil. The legitimate route is via a very steep incline which, on a warm day, is like a mini-marathon. I continued on to the Golf Club and further up the gradient of the Clyde valley. At the top, I found stairs that led up to what I thought was the back of the houses there. I continued along the street up there but found it led into a cul-de-sac and returned to the stairs. The view would have been better if they had trimmed the bloody trees.

At first the unpaved path made me wonder if such a neglected route could possibly be an entrance into the cemetery. My doubts were cast aside when an upset woman and her partner passed me and I knew the deceased lay ahead. The view from the gate was highly contrasted - the sun throwing graves into shadow under the multitude of trees. Many years ago when I didn't live where I currently reside, the Padre had taken my brother and I up to the cemetery to look for conkers, and I knew from then that most of the graves in the lower part were fairly old - mostly decaying 19th century headstones. I decided to see if I could find any war-dead graves - Crimea, Boer Wars, WWI, WWII - in an attempt to feel connected to history.

Early on I found reddish headstone marked:

WILLIAM GALLOWAY
AGED 22
KILLED IN ACTION AT CAMBRIA
FRANCE 31ST DEC. 1917

Until now, I could find nothing about Cambria with relation to France. Then whilst writing this, I came across some WWI pages on Google about it being the site of the first major tank battle in history. Crucially, a certain George Patton was present, and pulling up his page on Wikipedia yields 'The Battle of Cambrai'. I can't believe it. The engravers misspelt the guy's place of death! If I was related to him, I'd be insulted. Seems young Mr Galloway died during the German counter-attack. Having finally found out about the circumstances at the time he died, I do feel closer to the past. Black & White photography will always cast an air of un-reality over history. I also found a William Kirkwood Jr, who died in South Africa, 30th September 1903 - a date I thought could have been from the Second Boer War. That conflict, however, ended on the 31st of May 1902.

You'll notice the green dots stop not far from the entrance on the map. At that point I started wondering around (mostly covering the same area) and can't remember my precise movements to be able to plot them. Whilst wondering in circles, in and out amongst the plots, I did come across an odd grouping of three headstones, all proprietors of the local newspaper.

I decided to wander up to the open-air section at the top of the cemetery since I'd never been that far up, nor had I the opportunity to do so. As you come out from under the trees, you're presented with hundreds of graves dotted over the knolls. This section of the cemetery is the most recent - largely 70s, 80s and 90s. As I walked up onto the tallest knoll, I could see the sheer number of people that have died - the overwhelming majority of which ceased to exist through natural death. A crow or raven was jumping about in the next row of graves and I photographed it with the endless headstones in the background, but it didn't come out as I'd pictured it.

The time was getting on, and I decided to make my way back along the the wall running South-East, and happened to see a rabbit hopping about. I tried to get a picture, but it disappeared into the heart of the cemetery when it heard me trying to stealth it. I had a vague idea of what I was looking for (where it was and what it looked like), as my parents have often driven up to place new flowers, but I came across the distinctive gold-on-dark grey of the headstone of my Great-Grandmother (paternal). My way back took me into the dark centre, where I came across some squirrels startled by me, a small cathedral; and, unexpectedly, the memorial to Highland Mary.

The plaque describes how the local Burns Fanclub disinterred her and had their own little self-publicising ceremony in 1917 - my impression is that rather than a sincere relocation of her remains, it was an opportunity to get themselves closer to Burns through a minor figure in his history. Dead all the same.

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