Walk on the wild side

Well, not too wild, but we have discovered a great new series of walks on the Mountstewart estate on the Ards Peninsula.

Wednesday mornings see me participating in a Hidden History course organised by Stranmillis University College. There are ten walks in total, focussing on the Victorian heritage of Belfast. Today we saw around St Matthew's parish church at the top of the Shankill Road, reputedly the church was built to replace an original one started by St Patrick!

Then we walked down to the Shankill graveyard, a quiet, green oasis and the oldest in Belfast, with graves dating from 1620. The saddest one for me was a relatively recent one - a young RAF man who died in 1918 in the Great War, aged just 14 years.