Dead centre of Belfast

One part of this place I call home.
Friar’s Bush Graveyard on Stranmillis Road is Belfast’s oldest Christian burial site. It is the site of the medieval friary of St Patrick and contains the mysterious ‘Friar’s Stone’ with the implausible date, ‘AD 485’ inscribed on it. 
With the foundation of Belfast in 1610, the site became a graveyard for people of all denominations, but especially for the increasing Catholic population drawn to the rising industrial city from all parts of the north and west of Ireland. 
During the Penal persecution of the 18th century the Catholic population of the town attended Mass under an old thorn tree in the graveyard on Sundays. 
This practice, which gave Friar’s Bush its modern name, continued until 1769 when the Penal Laws began to ease.
Friar’s Bush was continually raided by the ‘resurrection men’ or body-snatchers in the early 1800s. In 1823 the local Newsletter reported the removal of the bodies of a woman and child from the graveyard. These bodies were later recovered from a barrel on a ship bound for Scotland.
During the Great Famine of the 1840s Friar’s Bush was used for the mass burial of up to 2,000 victims of hunger and cholera. 
History, but still within us.