Heaven on earth

Visiting graveyards on holiday is not just for genealogists and military historians; it’s for lovers of art and poetry, and for anyone with an interest in what their own memorial might look like.

Everybody visits the cemeteries of Highgate in London and Père Lachaise in Paris, but there is an almost greater pleasure to be had in discovering a small town cemetery or country churchyard, beside the sea or in the mountains, that is the resting place of a particular hero.

Visiting Barnoon Cemetery in St Ives is not on the list of things to do in that particular seaside town, but it should be. Its location is five-star: perched high above Porthmeor Beach and Tate St Ives, it has 180˚ views over the sea to Clodgy Point and the Godrevy Lighthouse. It is a tidy, well-kept Victorian cemetery, and it is full. The predominantly grey, granite graves are closely packed, so finding the burial place of the artist and mariner Alfred Wallis is not easy, particularly as his tomb is low on the ground, but it is certainly worth the hunt.

Wallis lies beneath horizontal painted tiles which depict a small man climbing the steps towards the open door of a tall lighthouse (the sort he painted). It is the work of potter Bernard Leach, a memorial by one of St Ives’s best-known and best-loved artists to another.

Further north on the Cornish coast, close to the 11th tee on the St Enodoc golf course, in the graveyard of St Enodoc Church, an ornately carved slate headstone, now embellished with lichen, marks the final resting place of the poet laureate John Betjeman. Whoever chose the spot chose well. It looks over the golf course to Bray Hill, the Camel Estuary and Damer Bay.