Fulham Palace Cemetery

As Jo mentioned in the last post, we now live next to a cemetery, just behind the houses on the other side of our street. Fulham Palace Cemetery is sometimes aptly known as 'Fulham Old', as it is the oldest cemetery in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, opening in 1865. Last weekend we went there for some wandering.


There are two major features of the cemetery. Firstly, the layout isn't very structured and for the most part the graves tend to be scattered around, strewn around the fields and amongst the trees rather than in any kind of rows. I think it is quite a nice way of having it.

The other notable thing is how old and run-down most of the place is. The cemetery has been closed to new burials for a long time, and most of the graves were around a hundred years old. Parts of the cemetery are badly neglected and overgrown, and many of the headstones are falling apart. In some places there are piles of ruined headstones that have had all their details worn away.



Also, the place is full of holes in the ground everywhere. Rabbits, foxes, badgers, or something more mysterious?



There are some some really lovely parts of the cemetery too, like some of the statues.




And there is one section that is well-kept, with a few rows of clean, looked-after World War II memorials.


P.S. Sorry for the lack of updates lately, one of us will write about York soon, I promise.