EHOD Part 3

On Sunday we started at Campbell College, as chronicled. Then I went to church, then we toured Friar’s Bush graveyard, a site of Christian worship going back to medieval times. A church stood on the site in the 1500s. Supposedly Catholics worshipped there under a thorn tree during the 1700s, when Catholics were not allowed to practice their religion, own land, or hold public office under the penal laws. Supposedly their priest was shot by Cromwell’s forces and buried under the thorn tree, thus Friar’s Bush.

The site was the main Catholic burial ground going back to the founding of Belfast. Thousands were cremated and buried there in a pauper’s mound during cholera epidemics tied to the series of famines in the 1800s.

Some of the more famous people buried there were men who founded various newspapers, men who owned pubs, and Bernard Hughes, inventor of the Belfast Bap and the most successful Catholic businessman of his time. This memorial is to Kevin Buggie, founder of a newspaper, who died at age 27.

There were plenty of women in the cemetery as well, including a woman who lived to age 105, no mean feat back in the 1700s.
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