Frosty morning in Warstone Lane Cemetery

[major_clanger]

We live not far from Warstone Lane Cemetery, one of Birmingham's more notable Victorian burial grounds. It features an impressive selection of gravestones and tombs, as well as - unusually for an English cemetery - catacombs. A few days ago we had a clear, frosty morning so I went for a walk along with cthulie and T who were visiting, in the hope of getting some good pictures. We weren't disappointed.

The catacombs (HDR merge of three pictures):



Frosty headstones:



Leaves, frost and fallen statuary:



Signs around the cemetery note that a lot of the gravestones have become unsafe and so have been laid flat. This makes them even more striking when frost settles:





We also noticed that where now-horizontal gravestones had deeply-recessed carving, it had accumulated leaves, filled with water and frozen:







I'd always thought black marble a little pretentious for monuments but it does frost up very nicely:



Full album here.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Ooh! Nice!

And since we now live in Shropshire, just down the road.

[watervole]

Feels like a mini Colosseum.

[watervole]

Teh fallen statue makes me thing of Tolkien's headless king.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Fantastic photos. I have explored that cemetery myself in the summer, but this is a whole new angle on it. I guess the catacombs were Bham's answer to the Circle of Lebanon at Highgate Cemetery - I've just checked the dates and Highate was opened 9 years earlier.

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

lovely photos