Glasgow Necropolis
Interesting facts
- The first person buried on the hill, in 1832, was a Jewish jeweller named Joseph Levi, a year before the Necropolis officially opened.
- The Jewish enclosure held only 57 burials before it was declared full in 1851; its entrance facade of 1836 imitates Absalom's Pillar in Jerusalem.
- The Egyptian Vaults, built into the hillside in 1837, were a temporary resting place for bodies while their graves and tombs were being prepared.
- The gates of the Egyptian Vaults are decorated with torches turned upside down yet still burning, beneath a winged hourglass for the swift flight of time.
- The Merchants' House bought the rocky hill in 1650 for its stone quarry; trees planted on the unquarried part gave it the name Fir Park.
- The John Knox monument combines a Doric column by Thomas Hamilton with a statue about 3.7 metres tall by the sculptor William Warren.
- Major Archibald Douglas Monteath lies in a tiered octagonal neo-Norman mausoleum designed by David Cousin in 1842, one of the cemetery's landmarks.
- William Miller, the poet who wrote the nursery rhyme Wee Willie Winkie, is commemorated by a marble bust carved by James Fillans.
- Lieutenant-General Sir James Grierson, who died in August 1914, is the highest-ranking of the 19 Commonwealth war dead buried here.
Why it is worth it
On a hill just east of Glasgow Cathedral, the Necropolis crowds the skyline with obelisks, temples, columns and mausolea, a Victorian city of the dead set deliberately above the living one. The Merchants' House of Glasgow began planning it in 1831, looking to the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris as a model for a landscaped garden cemetery, and it opened officially in 1833. The hill was already crowned by a monument to the reformer John Knox, raised in 1825, and the whole design grew around it.
The cemetery covers 37 acres and holds about 3,500 monuments over some 50,000 burials. Its approach is theatrical: from the cathedral side, visitors cross a ravine by a bridge completed in 1836 and known as the Bridge of Sighs, after the one in Venice, before passing through ornamental gates of 1838 and climbing winding paths past ever larger tombs. The merchants, industrialists and shipowners of the second city of the Empire competed here in stone, and the roll of designers reads like a history of Glasgow architecture: Alexander "Greek" Thomson, John Bryce, David Hamilton, and the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose Celtic cross for Andrew McCall dates from 1888. Styles from every period of the past are borrowed at will. The first burials, in 1832, were in the Jewish ground in the north-west corner, before the formal opening.
What makes the place memorable is the combination of this architectural exuberance with the view. From the summit the cathedral's medieval roof lies directly below, and beyond it the city spreads toward the Clyde. Weathered sandstone, ivy and the sheer density of monuments give the hill a brooding romance, especially in low winter light. Volunteers of the Friends of Glasgow Necropolis, founded in 2005, lead tours and have raised funds to restore neglected tombs.
Getting there
The Necropolis is about 1.7 km from central Glasgow, entered beside Glasgow Cathedral at the top of High Street, an easy walk from the city centre. The nearest airport is Glasgow Airport (GLA), about 12.7 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Glasgow Necropolis is a Victorian cemetery in Glasgow, Scotland. It is on a low but very prominent hill to the east of Glasgow Cathedral in an area bordered by the Townhead and Dennistoun districts to the north east of the modern city centre. Fifty thousand individuals have been buried here. Typical for the period, only a small percentage are named on monuments and not every grave has a stone. Approximately 3,500 monuments exist here.
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