ON THE Stranmillis Road, formerly called Friars Bush Road, lies the old graveyard of Friar's Bush.
The history of the burial place is very obscure. On the 1570 map of Belfast it appears as 'Freerstone' ('Friars Town') with three houses depicted there, and as 'Bush Fryars' in a map of around 1604. An inquisition of James I refers to the place as 'Ballynabraher'- 'the town of the friars'. Friar's Bush is the old Catholic burial ground for Belfast but many Protestant families were interred there also.
In the dark Penal Days the Catholics attended Mass in the old graveyard on the banks of the Lagan. A scene on St Patrick's Day, 1724 is recorded by Thomas Banks, then Constable of the Castle of Belfast: 'March the 17th, being the Feast of St Patrick last, I waited upon the magistrates of this town on the alarm being raised that the Popish inhabitants ... had assembled at a place called Fryar's Bushe, about two miles from here. Accompanied by two officers and a party of Colonel Molesworth's regiment ... we proceeded ... on the way to Malone. On the way of our approach to the old church, long a ruin, we beheld many by the wayside and we apprehended one Neale Donnelly of this town, a merchant and Papist, now held by men in the Bridewell. 'Getting to the place stated we saw about 200 of the poorest sort of inhabitants, a sort deluded by the religious acts of Popish priests and friars ... No priest nor friar was seen but we apprehended six men. [These included James Boyle, Lisburn; John O'Hare of Belfast, skinner; and Micheal O'Neile, huxter.]
This is all the information the Constable gives us but it truly reflects the dreadful position of the Catholic people in that dark age so late as the eighteenth century. The Crown Book for the Antrim Assizes having been destroyed in 1922, one cannot follow up the fate of the arrested men, but it is possible that they were hanged.
Friars Bush graveyard was raised at the Privy Council at Dublin Castle when Isaac Butt, QC, 'the Father of Home Rule', pleaded the case of the Catholics. That was in 1869 when the cemetery was closed due to overcrowding. (Formerly the medieval 'Chapel of St Patrick' and linked to Shankill ('the Old Church') in the 1306 Pope Nicholas' Taxation, Friar's Bush served as a 'Mass Station' for local Catholics until 1769. There is a long tradition that a friar was hanged there.)