Personal monuments at beauty spots a step too far

IT MUST be something in the dying of an old year and the dawning of a new one.

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It tends to be a time that draws us towards the places where we go to remember those that have passed.

That's my excuse anyway for spending a little too much time around cemeteries and burial grounds in recent days.

From Newgrange on the winter solstice where - if you're alive to it - you can sense a connection to something bigger than just your own story.

To Glasnevin, conceived and founded by the Great Liberator Daniel O'Connell so the poor of Dublin City could be remembered with some dignity in death, and where several of my family’s past generations have gone for the big sleep.

And on out to Balgriffin, where my parents are buried under the flight path of Dublin Airport, and where my then three-year-old daughter once wondered if the planes that passed overhead every five minutes were ferrying the dearly departed to heaven (if they were, Michael O'Leary was surely charging them for the privilege).

Whether it’s a neolithic passage tomb, O'Connell's own magnificent round tower mausoleum or a modest gravestone, there is this want in us to leave some mark behind.

To carve “We Woz Here” into the tree of life as proof we once existed.