Firstly, it is obviously a place to bury the dead, but many cemeteries are filled to capacity and since burial in the UK is in perpetuity, spaces are running out. A secular place, with slate stones for markers, it is a place of calm and beauty where the bodies of those gone are put into the earth to become part of it.

From the path alongside the River Lune he took footpaths and byways across Lancaster and Morecambe to link up two small cemeteries and a crematorium. I became aware of this book when the author, Peter Ross, kindly agreed to take part in our local book festival which of course last year had to be entirely online. The book is also a meditation on a personal approach to mortality, burial customs, and what follows after. He includes examples of both the barbaric past (the witch’s grave in Torry Bay) and the barbaric present (the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, the shooting of Lyra McKee in Belfast). Fascinating these lives may have been – and Ross is right, Hessel’s is a BBC drama series waiting to happen – but they have all reached a full stop.

In 2018 Danny Boyle co-ordinated a series of surreal sand portraits along the coasts of Britain to mark the centenary of the Great War. Perfect for anyone that has ever walked through a graveyard and wondered of the stories behind the inscriptions. The first barmaid in England to have been eaten by a tiger (Hannah Twynoy, 23 October 1703, Malmesbury) makes it into his pages.

This makes many rich connections, for instance between the outcasts of Crossbones in Southwark, and Ireland's incinerated plots for unnoticed babies. My favorite cemeteries in the world are Mound Cemetery in Marietta, Ohio as there is a Native American mound there alongside being where my grandfather is buried alongside Père Lachaise in Paris, which is always my first stop when I am in Paris. There are those who are interested in paying their respects to famous people, their own family members, or someone who represents something connected to their identity. A walk through the graveyards of Britain guided by one of the most engaging wordsmiths willing to take you by the hand. A Tomb With a View: the stories and glories of graveyards is the first book I am writing about that is actually concerned with cemeteries.Verdict: There are so many stories in this book, it is one I will be dipping in and out of for some time. Ross also speaks to Mohamed Omer of the hugely difficult task he had of dealing with the profound bereavement of relatives of the Grenfell fire – a bereavement made so much more difficult because the bodies could not be buried for some considerable time. His curiosity and interest in people shines through; you feel he really does want to know as much as is possible about the lives of the people who are buried in our cemeteries and what befell them. A quick Google would have corrected that for him but he clearly didn't bother putting the effort in, and that, in a nutshell, is what a lot of the book felt like. With the loss of both my parents, I can see that by visiting these places of memorial we keep those who have passed with us, and we hear their story.

One hundred years after the end of the First World War, men who fought in it are still being buried in Belgium and France, as their bodies are retrieved and identified. Uncovering those histories has been something that has captivated Peter Ross and in A Tomb With a View, he finds the stories of the people who inhabit graveyards and the people that still care about them. The cillin - the forgotten graves of unbaptised children in Ireland, rejected by the church, and dug by their bereft parents - and the ultimate fate of many of those lost at Grenfell Tower make for particularly difficult reading.

But it is especially delightful to encounter peaceful green spaces full of wildlife and intriguing personal histories. I am in two minds of both systems; on the one hand I thoroughly enjoy wandering around cemeteries that have very old burial plots, yet on the other hand, if people continue to wish to be buried, they have to go somewhere. They let the most talkative of my guests fall silent, and enjoy that silence, and they all talked to me later about the impression it made on them.

It's very different from Sprackland's spare elegance, less restrained and more sprawling, less elegiac and more full of gusto, sometimes jokey and interested, as a good journalist would be in the varieties of human life and death to be encountered around graveyards. His journey will take him from the natural burial site of Sharpham Meadow in Devon where he meets Bridgitt and the resting place of her late husband Wayne where she is picking leaves off the discreet stone with his name on. There was also a deal of civic and national pride involved – so Kensal Green was London’s answer to Pere Lachaise in Paris. To the taphophile - a lover of graves- Sheridan’s lair is the equivalent of a rare bird to the twitcher.It is full of absolutely fascinating stories from various graveyards big and small around Britain, Ireland and beyond, in cities and towns, on tiny islands and even on mountain tops. a considered and moving book on the timely subject of how the dead are remembered, and how they go on working below the surface of our lives. Ross takes us from Flanders Fields to the Victorian garden cemeteries to the divided cemeteries of Belfast and strange ossuaries in Rothwell and Hythe. Peter Ross has been writing, with great empathy and care, of lives great and small throughout his journalistic career.