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What Are Headstones Like in the UK?
By Thom Sanders
When travelling around the world, it's not particularly
likely you'll spend a lot of time in cemeteries. Most
people prefer to spend their holidays on the beach, or
walking through gorgeous countryside, or experiencing
all the cultural delights that wherever they're visiting
has to offer. No, graveyards and cemeteries definitely
are not on top of the list of most people's holiday days
out. If they were, however, people might notice that
gravestone and memorial headstone styles vary enormously
from country to country and continent to continent.
Western European and North American headstones tend to
follow similar patterns and styles. For centuries, they
have used darker stones like granite, and made solemn,
imposing slabs that stand out against the landscape.
Keeping these carefully regimented has also been
popular, making them very obvious marks across
landscapes. Religious inscriptions are also popular, as
is burying family members together.
Narrowing our focus a little more to look at gravestones
in the UK, we find similar patterns to most of Western
Europe but with an added emphasis on solemnity and with
much more dark stone used. The prevalence of darker
stones being quarried across the country has a large
part to play in this, but the UK also uses dark stones
for a lot of its religious buildings (churches, for
instance, are often built out of hard, long wearing,
dark stones) and black has traditionally been considered
the colour that represents mourning. It makes sense,
then, that something which marks the spot where the
deceased is buried should follow both those patterns as
well.
The slab design has also been a constant, whereas other
countries opt for crosses or pillars more frequently.
This may be to maintain the uniformity of cemeteries, or
for reasons of cost and ease of creation. Richer members
of society have frequently opted for more ostentatious
burial sites, such as mausoleums or elaborate tombs,
showing that perhaps this cultural pattern emerged from
frugality.
The UK gravestone scene has also been resistant to
imports from America, where more elaborate memorial
headstones have been becoming increasingly popular in
the last half century, especially for deaths that are
considered special in some way, such as the death of
infants. This ostentatious approach tends to wear
quicker, especially in the British climate, which may be
yet another reason for the approach taken in the UK, or
they may have been disregarded for not fitting with the
established pattern of being solemn focuses for
mourning. |
