When Jack Cooke turned 33 years old he embarked upon a road trip like no other.

After a visit to a local churchyard Jack had a few big questions to which he hoped to find the answers. “Most of us live in denial of death,” he writes and wondered why as an individual (and a society) we are so divorced from death. “I had become morbidly obsessed, preoccupied with the thought of all those men and women underground.” Sound familiar, Radnor Street Cemetery followers?

I’m guessing he undertook a fair bit of research before he embarked upon his taphophile tour of the British Isles. And what mode of transport did he choose – why, a hearse, of course. At this point I wondered if the book might be an irreverent Disney-like gallop through numerous cemeteries, but nothing could be further from the truth.

During the course of his 2,000 mile, month long journey Jack visited ‘the last grave’ at All Saints graveyard Dunwich, in danger of sliding into the North Sea; crept around Highgate Cemetery in the dead of night and travelled to the Isle of Rum in the Inner Hebrides.

And now I intend to google all the places he visited and see what pictorial evidence there remains.

The End of the Road by Jack Cooke – A journey around Britain in search of the dead. First published by Mudlark 2021.