The Slow Flow of the Southern Necropolis

It’s interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.

Bohumil Hrabal

The southern necropolis is home to around 250,000 dead including the notable architects Charles Wilson and Alexander 'Greek' Thomson. Its many 'notable dead' are mentioned on a small leaflet published by the city council, but it's the peace and quiet and the slow flow of growth and decay that attracts me to cemeteries like this. Glasgow is fortunate in having some large and interesting dormitories for the dead, namely, the Central Necropolis, Sighthill, Lambhill and the Western Necropolis, Cardonald, and the Eastern Necropolis (behind Parkhead Stadium). Whether you are a budding botanist or birdwatcher or just an avid seeker of peace, cemeteries are wonderful spaces to spend a slow summer's afternoon lazing beneath a lime tree.

This last photo, taken during the summer months, is of the broken headstone of the Glasgow poet and writer Hugh MacDonald who wrote the very popular Rambles Round Glasgow in the 1850s. As a poet, MacDonald not only extolled the local over the global long before it was fashionable but wrote passionately about Greater Glasgow and the coast.

Echoing Martin Martin in A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland in 1776 - 'The modern itch after knowledge of foreign places is so prevalent that the generality of mankind bestow little thought or time upon the place of their nativity' - MacDonald writes in his preface to his Rambles..

The district of which Glasgow is the centre, while it possesses many scenes of richest Lowland beauty, and presents many glimpses of the stern and wild in Highland landscape, is peculiarly fertile in reminiscences of a historical nature. In the latter respect, indeed, it is excelled by few localities in Scotland,—a circumstance of which many of our citizens seem to have been hitherto almost unconscious. There is a story told of a gentleman who, having boasted that he had travelled far to see a celebrated landscape on the Continent, was put to the blush by being compelled to own that he had never visited a scene of superior loveliness which was situated upon his own estate, and near which he had spent the greater portion of his life. The error of this individual, however, is one of which too many are guilty. We have thousands amongst ourselves who can boast of their familiarity with the wonders of other lands, yet who have never traced the windings of the Clyde, the Cart, or the Kelvin, and who have never dreamed of visiting the stately ruins of Bothwell, or of penetrating that sanctum of Gothic magnificence, the crypt of our own venerable Cathedral! To such parties we would say, that admiration, like charity, should begin at home; and that there are many things of beauty and of interest to be met with in the course of a brief ramble among the environs of our own city. [My emphasis]

And so admiration begins...