Kalkara Naval Cemetery

Where it sits. The Kalkara Naval Cemetery lies on the ridge between Kalkara and the Rinella coast, with its main entrance at the junction of Triq Santu Rokku and Triq San Leonardu. It is also known as the Capuccini Naval Cemetery, after the Capuchin friary that stood nearby, and that is the name used on most British naval records. The ground slopes gently, with cypresses and low walls, and from the upper paths you catch the sea beyond the Rinella headland. It is roughly a kilometre inland from Fort Rinella and about the same from the Kalkara waterfront.

The story behind it. Malta was the Royal Navy's principal base in the Mediterranean for a century and a half, and a base of that size needs its own burial ground. The cemetery was laid out in the 1860s specifically for the naval establishment and remained in the Navy's hands until the British withdrawal. It is divided into Protestant and Roman Catholic sections, a division that reflects both the mixed religious composition of ships' companies and the practical realities of burying men in a Catholic country. What it contains is therefore not only war dead but the ordinary attrition of a peacetime fleet: men killed by boiler accidents and falls from rigging, by cholera and typhoid, by the slow diseases of long commissions.

The numbers. Roughly 1,085 graves here are those of Commonwealth service personnel from the two world wars — some 351 from the First and about 694 from the Second — alongside more than 1,400 non-military burials and a further 137 war graves of men of other nationalities. Most of the Commonwealth war graves are in the Protestant section. The site is protected at the highest grade on Malta's national inventory of cultural property, and the war graves are maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to its usual standard, with uniform headstones set in mown grass.

Why so many are here. The concentration of First World War graves has a specific cause. During the Gallipoli campaign and the eastern Mediterranean operations, Malta became the principal hospital island for the region, taking in well over a hundred thousand sick and wounded men and acquiring the nickname of the nurse of the Mediterranean. The naval hospital at Bighi, two kilometres away on the headland, was the receiving point; the men who did not survive their evacuation were buried here. The Second World War pattern is different: convoy casualties, submariners, dockyard workers and the crews of ships hit in the harbour during the sustained bombing of 1941 and 1942, when the Grand Harbour was one of the most heavily attacked targets in Europe.

What you actually see. The character of the place is a mixture of two kinds of memorial. There are the standardised war-grave headstones in ranks, plain and legible, and then there are the Victorian and Edwardian monuments — obelisks, draped urns, broken columns, anchors carved in stone — that ships' companies paid for themselves when a shipmate died. Those private monuments are the most affecting part, because they are inscribed with the name of the ship as often as the name of the man, and reading along a row gives a roll call of vessels that spent their careers in this harbour. Mature trees and shrubs have grown up between the plots, so the cemetery reads as a quiet walled garden rather than a parade ground.

Visiting it properly. This is not a monument to be photographed and left. The reasonable approach is to allow half an hour and walk the main axis, then a couple of side paths, reading inscriptions rather than scanning them. Dress and behave as you would in any active burial ground; Maltese families still tend graves in the Catholic section. There is no entrance fee and no visitor centre; a register and plot plan are available through the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for anyone tracing a specific burial, and it is worth looking up a grave reference before travelling if you have someone particular to find.

Getting there and timing. Buses from Valletta and the Three Cities stop in Kalkara, from where it is an uphill walk of about fifteen minutes; by car there is space to park on the street near the gate. The obvious combination is with Fort Rinella and the Rinella coast, which lie downhill to the east, and with Bighi on the other side of the village — the three together make a coherent half-day on the British naval history of the harbour. Go early in the day in summer, since the walk up is exposed and the cemetery has only patchy shade. In November a Remembrance service is held here, which is the one occasion when the ground is busy.