War Graves Week (21 – 28 May 2021) organised by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission encourages communities to find out about the World War heritage on their doorstep. Your local cemetery probably contains the final resting places of some of the men and women who fought and died in the two world wars. Certainly both our local cemeteries (that we have discovered to be such wildlife havens since we started walking around them at the beginning of lockdown 2020) contain a number of such graves.
To mark War Graves Week, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Scotland are running small, socially distanced guided tours of Edinburgh's Comely Bank Cemetery.
This is a lovely wooded cemetery that I have often admired from the bus but have never before visited. So today I went along to find out more and enjoyed a fascinating guided tour that took in the sad stories behind some of the many war graves in this site, which sits next to the Craigleith Military Hospital (now the Western General).
If you don't have the chance to visit the cemetery in real life, you can experience it a virtual guided tour here.
The guided tour is a lovely idea - I may well do this over the week end.
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for this post ...
ReplyDeleteAll the best Jan
Those guided tours of the cemetery is a neat idea. Do Brits celebrate the war dead the same time as we celebrate Memorial Day?
ReplyDeleteHi Jeff, we remember our war dead on Remembrance Sunday the second Sunday in November
ReplyDeleteA little late to the party, but like Jeff said, it has some echoes of the US Memorial Day (last Monday of May) observance. One of the local organizations here puts up crosses through town, with the names of war veterans who have passed on and the war(s) they participated in (some career soldiers were in WW2 and Korea, or Korea and Vietnam, depending on their age). I need to go find my father in law’s cross—he didn’t actually see any action, but he was on a ship in Seattle, ready to head into the Pacific Theater, when Japan surrendered. Talk about (literally) dodging a bullet!
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