Surrey: Painted by Sutton Palmer; Described by A.R. Hope MoncrieffMoncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
History
Surrey: Painted by Sutton Palmer; Described by A.R. Hope Moncrieff
Moncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
Surrey (England) -- Description and travel
On the other side of the railway spreads a great Camp of the Dead, which
Londoners will style _Woking_ Cemetery, to the indignation of that
lively young town, three or four miles away. The Brookwood
burying-ground, belonging to the London Necropolis Company, is the
largest in the country, and in beauty grows into competition with some
of the elaborate cemeteries of American cities. Laid out half a century
ago, on part of a large estate belonging to the Company, it encloses 500
acres of sandy land, which, among its native turf and heather, has been
planted with flower-beds, clumps of wood, banks of rhododendrons and
other shrubs, that go to disguise the gloomy shadows of the grave. Apart
from the division between those who have and have not the right to sleep
in consecrated earth, certain areas are allotted to London parishes, or
to communities such as the London Bakers, the Foresters' Society, etc.,
so that the associations of life are not lost in death; there is an
"Actors' Acre," as well as an "Oddfellows Acre," also a last common
bivouac for the Chelsea Pensioners and the corps of Commissionaires;
fellow-countrymen, too, can lie side by side, and fellow-believers of
many a creed: a notable feature, for instance, is the Parsees'
resting-place, so far from their Eastern Towers of Silence. The Company
has its own railway station in London, from which special funeral trains
convey their mournful freight into the cemetery, all arrangements being
carried out with as much reverence as is consistent with the conditions
of crowded city life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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