The past year in pictures, first part

During the past year, I took over thousand photographs. Without inspecting them in any detail, I had just nonchalantly dumped them to /random/photos/. Last weekend, I browsed them through in an effort to find the pictures I loved enough to want developed.

During the following weeks, I'm going to some select pictures of that stash - most of it buildings and places I found especially charming, sad or moving. Here's the first;


This picture was taken at graveyard in Stirling. Build on a hill between the town castle and a Victorian prison, the centuries old (and still used) graveyard had beautiful statues erected by rich corpses as well as modest graves. Many of them were covered in moss, and some were just broken, presumably by vandals.

I don't know how they did things at Scotland, but in Finland the church decides 20 odd years back that "resting place for all eternity" meant actually "about 50 years"*. If after 50 years no relatives would be found (and ready to pay rent), the gravestone would be removed and the land given to someone recently passed away.

Seeing as how many of the gravestones were over 100, 150 years old, in bad condition and covered by plants, it should be safe tosay this is not so in Scotland. One has to wonder, though, how do they find places for new graves? Land is an expensive commodity, particularly near population centres.

*You could probably write something sarcastic about this.