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A Little Book Of
TOMBS & MONUMENTS

When someone dies, we want to remember them – to make their last resting place an appropriate memorial of their life. For the grand personages of earlier times, it was important to plan their own monument, to ensure that their status would endure in perpetuity. This urge to consecrate and commemorate a short human life has led, since the earliest times, to the most magnificent tombs and monuments in our churchyards, chapels and cathedrals. Now, Mike Harding – travelling not just the length and breadth of Britain but as far afield as New Mexico and Savannah, Georgia, has visited and photographed the finest, most idiosyncratic and most singular. Here, then, carved in alabaster or marble, or blazoned in glowing stained glass, are the Mediaeval couple Sir John and Martha Suckling in a church in Norwich; the Countess of Cumberland in Appleby; numerous tombs and memorials to young children, the poignancy of their untimely deaths still piercing after hundreds of years; the austere mausoleum containing D.H. Lawrence’s remains up in the hills in Taos, and even the stained-glass Thomas the Tank Engine in a Gloucestershire church commemorating the life of the Rev. W.H. Awdry.

2008