One letterboxer in particular includes in the clues a side-trip through the old cemeteries he plants his stamps in, to view the work (gravestone-carving work) of particular artisans, and tells you a bit about each artist in the process. It's that combination of historical detail and actual, real-life experience (of the art, in this case) that makes for grade A letterboxing, in my opinion.
That letterboxer has definitely piqued my interest in wandering through ye olde cemeteries -- if you're the morose, Byronic sort, you might also get a kick out of this kind of stuff (a kick into the wind, that is, in reaction to the futility of life and the meaningless of passion and emotion in the face of that futility -- and yet you can't NOT kick, because what if some attractive women are watching, and how will they know you're thinking such deep thoughts otherwise: a Byronic kick, in other words), and so I offer you a bit of tids here. (Not just one tidbit, but a few.)
A lunette is the semi-circular part of the tops of vertical tombstones. (See more info on the parts of gravestones here.) You can see an example of an hourglass lunette here (because I took this picture of it):
This stone is from Mount Feake Cemetery in Waltham, MA and memorialized George Barker Pope and Sarah Mason Pope, both born in 1842. I'm planning on putting a letterbox version of this image nearby in the cemetery, as part of my letterboxing internship. (More on that later.)
This particular stone, as a(nother) clever blogger better informed than me pointed out, is somewhat rare, as the winged hourglass usually shows up as part of the lunette image but not the entire thing. I was less impressed with the rarity when I found that it was, like the stone mentioned by said other clever blogger, not a colonial-era stone, but crafted in the early twentieth century in a "colonial revival" age of tombstonery. (Sarah died in 1929, George in 1899.)
On the other hand, this stone and others like it, with that old-tyme-but-updated feel, certainly seems better to me than some of the contemporary gravestones I've seen: one shaped like a snare drum, one with a VW Beetle carved in relief, one with a long-haired guitar player depicted on the top. It's a bit like seeing a graveyard for hippies, but more "camp" than that.
At any rate, I imagine in 200 years someone's going to come across the long-haired guitarist, or the VW stone, and feel they've won the jackpot of tombstones. I wish I could know whether people in the early 1900's thought the "colonial revival" stones seemed pretentious and tacky.
In the meantime, I might wander Byronically around local cemeteries, seeming (but not being) pretentious and tacky.
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