In 2018, I began to write about graveyards and cemeteries. I didn’t know then that my book would be published in the middle of a global pandemic. The End of the Road isn’t all doom and gloom though, and the book is filled with characters larger than life (even those who’ve been buried for years).
The idea was born in a small Suffolk churchyard, where I became bewitched by the gravestones I live alongside. Filled with a desire to uncover their stories, I began to plot a series of biographies, woven into a tale of the open road.
The result is a tomb tour of the British Isles. The journey was made in an old Daimler hearse, a vehicle that served both as camper van and time machine, bringing me physically closer to the past. Over hundreds of miles on Britain’s back roads, I attempted to collect the ghosts of the dead, from eccentrics and martyrs, to my own long-lost relatives. At the heart of the book is the landscape through which I travelled; graves were visited on bleak hill tops and in deep caves, hidden in ruins and stranded on small islands.
I hope you’ll join me on the journey. And one day, when we’re all allowed to travel again, I hope you’ll visit some of these same places where our ancestors vanished into the earth.
Until then, memento mori. (Try not to worry too much about it)
