A Walk Around Glasgow Necropolis

Amy Anderson takes a break from the busy Glasgow city centre life and heads for the City’s Necropolis.

Glasgow Necropolis is perched dramatically on the eastern edge of the city centre on a steep outcrop of ground near St. Mungo’s Cathedral. Now surrounded by urban modernity, the necropolis dates from the 6th century and it does have the feel of an ancient naturalised ruin, and somehow manages to ignore the thrum of the Tenants Lager factory that intrudes on to the moist quiet of the cemetery’s lower reaches.

The main parade of gravestones sit in rows on well kept lawns on the exposed top of the site. Walking up the slope it has an eerie, Wuthering Heights feel about it. And it really is a parade - no modest rounded heads of weathered slate or sandstone here. Instead, I go back in time to the heyday of Victorian egos. Several rows of huge polished granite shapes emerge on the horizon and vie for attention. Obelisks ten feet high, gravestones the size of church altars, stone spikes, truncated triangles, gothic shapes all bruise the steely Sunday sky, all shout in gold leaf letters of these dead men’s achievements in banking, manufacturing, ship building and religion.

An ambulance wails from somewhere down in the city but its siren seems distant and unimportant up here in this place full of ghosts and its urgent sound is absorbed by luminous lawns and rhododendron bushes. Fittingly perhaps, my mobile can’t find a signal here and I get the feeling the place wants me gone, so I walk down the steep roughened track towards the main entrance, past a host of other vaults and mausoleums, completing my circular walk and return to the land of the living.