Chapel, St Woolos cemetery

“Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.”
Steven Pinker
Interesting visit to St Woolos cemetery today with S to find the graves of Annie Brewer (WWI nurse) and John Byrne (Crimean War veteran and VC), which she’d stumbled upon by accident while visiting with a friend. So we didn’t know where the graves were, but we had a selection of photos taken on the day, and ‘naturally’ thought they’d help us locate the graves. We began our ‘interesting’ navigation exercise by retracing their route through the gap in the hedgerow and following half-remembered tracks – it’s a big cemetery and they were more interested in a catch-up than remembering a route. We were chatting about something entirely different too when bingo, we found Annie Brewer’s resting place, tick. Finding the next one began with a ‘walk through’ the recollection of the day, peppered with anecdotes about all sorts of other things, and the time stamps on the photos from the day including a recognisable landmark, an obelisk – the grave was time-stamped 16 minutes away, but which direction? Flagging down a passing truck with cemetery workers didn’t give any further hints, so we had to turn to some super-sleuthing. Intermediate photos showed some storage outbuildings, which looked to be over the other end of the cemetery, which was more open and seemed a more likely location from the photo. The photo of the grave showed what looked like a Magnolia in bloom (it was taken in Spring) with some rather distinctive shaped conifers in a fairly open area. So now all we had to do was find a Magnolia tree of a certain shape which had lost its foliage, backed by two wonky conifers. How difficult could that be? As it turned out, easier than expected as we found a couple of suspects (we’d been looking for about half an hour though), but with the wrong perspective; so we circled around to follow the angle shown in the perspective in the photo and there it was, the grave that is. To be able to find it again I thought I’d need something a bit more recognisable, so the nearby Catholic Chapel with it’s memorial to the Rosminian Fathers seemed a good landmark, and a suitable subject for todays Blip. The whole point of this was to get source material for the family history journal by the way.