Spring Sunlight in the Cemetery...

In a city, a quiet walk surrounded by greenery is often hard to come by but fortunately the old cemetery at the end of my street is pretty and peaceful...

Time-worn gravestones, ivy-strewn and coloured with moss and lichen have a calming quality that the unyielding marble tombs do not, so I prefer to wander around the oldest parts of the cemetery, near the crumbling old walls and under the branches of the yew trees.

I love looking at the now barely-legible carved inscriptions, even though these can only ever refer to someone's sad loss, regardless of the countless years that separate their lifetime from ours. Yet somehow the decades and centuries that have passed since those beings left this life make this feel less morbid and more reflective.

The symbols of Life, Death and Eternity are found everywhere, often appearing to be almost quaint today since their exact significance is largely lost on us today.

Many of the religious allusions are indeed unintellible; a whole realm of meaning has been shut off to us as we cannot read the scripture in the sculpture as our ancestors could.

There are several oddd-looking owls on the older tombs, peering down on visitors, staring on in their wisdom, probably dumb-founded by our ignorance!

A swan-like pelican feeds its young - supposedly with its own blood - in a sign of charity and sacrifice.

Solumn figures guard the corners of headstones...

Some almost smiling, others eyes lowered...

Almost resembling symbolic Green Men.

And finally Springtime flowers, ephemeral yet perennial.