Another Place of Note

When I was living in England, one of the highlights of my time there was a visit to Highgate Cemetary. There's nothing quite like having to bribe a decrepit volunteer tourguide with a five pound note to see the Rossetti family grave. (One would have thought I had showed up with a spade and the claim that I was going to discover further of Dante's unpublished works.) Extraordinarily odd volunteers aside, Highgate is an amazing place that has slowly been transformed from its opening in 1839 into an urban wilderness--not that this was the intent of its founders. You see, the cemetary ran out of plots early on in the last century, so there was no money to maintain the place for about fifty years. There still isn't enough money to keep all but a handful of trails open. Highgate was the place where everybody who was anybody was buried and given the Victorian devotion to all things funereal, the gravestones and statuary are very impressive. You can get a bit of the flavor of the place from the website:

http://www.highgate-cemetery.org/