An evocative and uplifting study of cemeteries, where every headstone has a story to tell
On 20 March 2014, two women were walking through Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin after visiting the grave of a family friend when they found the body of Shane MacThomáis, who had written books about the city and its cemetery. He was 46 and had been struggling with depression for some time. He was also, as Peter Ross says, “the best-known guide at the most-famous cemetery in Ireland”, visited by 200,000 people a year.
MacThomáis once said of Glasnevin: “The place is so vast you could tell the whole history of Ireland ten times over.” It is a city within a city; its 124 acres hold 1.5m graves, more than Dublin’s current population. “I don’t think he saw it as a place where dead people were laid to rest,” said his daughter. “I think he saw it as so much information stored around him. It was like a library.” MacThomáis’s knowledge of Irish history was so vast, Ross writes, “that his suicide was likened to a library burning down”. He was buried alongside his father in the cemetery that had meant so much to him.