A day in Glasgow before I set off on the West Highland Way was full of religious art mixed in with public life. I explored the rainy city on foot while waiting for my partner, David, to take the train in from the Isle of Iona, where he’d spent week 7 of his sabbatical. I walked from my hotel along the River Clyde, before turning northeast up the hill to the city’s cathedral and a cemetery created by Glasgow’s Victorian merchant class. After 1831, one’s faith or morality no longer had to determine where one was buried; unfortunately, one’s wealth and class still would. There was great profit to be made (both by private cemeteries and by grave robbers) in bustling trade cities that celebrated these “cities of the dead” like Glasgow’s Necropolis and Paris’s Cimitiére du Pére-Lachaise.
The light misting turned to a steady downpour as I left the cathedral, so before I traipsed through the glorious graveyard loo…
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