Headstones in the cemetery at Castle Ashby, an estate village and country house in rural Northamptonshire, England. A cemetery is a place (usually an enclosed area of land) in which dead bodies are buried. In Europe from the 7th to the late 18th century, burial was under the control of the church and on sacrosanct church ground. Municipal or independent cemeteries, as we now know them, date from the early 19th century, the earliest being Pere Lachaise in 1804 in Paris. The idea then spread through Europe with the Napoleonic invasions.Photo credit: R. Neil Marshman