Went down to the iron bridge today,brings back memories crossing it to go to work in the Ulster Timber Co.
Not as many train lines as there were then,I recall that when going home a five o'clock my mates persuaded me to crossover the lines instead of using the bridge,I didn't like to as there were quite a few trains about,the next night I used the bridge,the police were waiting for my mates,done for trespass.

Hi Dargan. No doubt you have researched the history of the Shore Road vigorously and your contributions are, dare I say, educational. I came across PRONI Historical maps of the area dating back to 1832. I mention this just for the interest of others who may not have trawled their way through such maps.it is possible to swipe from one date to another and look at the progress of growth in the area.

 Hallo Sam,
 
I'm not known for brevity but I'll do all this again for the sake of interest and because it's beneath the skin. Skip to the *** paragraph if you only want to know about the locale.
 
Thanks again from you memories of the place. I'm interested in the trough you mention because anything which gives information on the old layout of that particular spot is good information. Sadly, people who recall horses being watered there are now very few, and all I have are notes to draw on about what I was told 30 years ago when older people were giving me accounts of the 1930s and 40s. We have heard of this trough previously, and although some would scoff and say it was unimportant, we who are interested in Ringan Point realise that small scraps of information can be very helpful and enlightening – and have been.
 
You have asked where Ringan Point is, see below. But first of all, if interested take your pick between Ringan/Ringen/Ringsend and others. I think when things were swallowed by the mists of time and human intervention we also saw it referred to as "Ringings." What may be at play here is the good old Belfast thing of sticking an "ing" on the end of things because it sounds posher. Anyway, there was an article earlier on the thread about someone having lost a "Newfoundland Dog" and to apply to "Ringings Point." It's another age when people spelled words as they saw fit, but it morphing into Ringings could well be a posh-ism in someone, daft though it seems. (How many times have we heard someone call a jug a joog?). Parvenus have existed everywhere in all times.
 
However, this lost Newfoundland dog: that was in about 1830. Round about that time a lot changed in the locale of Ringan Point when the old house there was pulled down and the lands added to the Mount Vernon estate lands. I'm sure you'll well remember Mount Vernon house when it was the school premises. None of us recall its one-time rolling acres, for this was long ago. But some on the thread remember it as a derelict building, defunct from the end of WW2 when it had been an ARP post. There were images of it being refurbished and turned into a school. All gone because of the greed and lack of community-spirit of photo bucket owners.
 
***So where is Ringan Point? You have to now paint a picture in your imagination. The Shore Road once had the tide come right up to its edge, and from what we can gather the bottom of Fortwilliam Park once had some kind of a headland projecting out into the channels. This was Ringan Point. Old maps refer. Salt marsh was present along there, so don't think of some neat coastline, but a jagged set of inlets, the water coming further up to the edge at some places than others. I think Ringan Point was maybe the most "water-logged" part of the natural highway along the coastline, but that's only speculation. If you remember the man-made headland known as Alec's bank, well think of a bigger, natural headland of a similar kind continuing out into the lough at the bottom of what we know as Fortwilliam. Think of it as a place you could perhaps walk along the top of and look down either side at the water lapping its edges, the rough, amphibious grasses the habitats of certain sea-birds. A sort of mini peninsula to gaze down from at the wildlife. But I don't want you to think this is an accurate representation, for no-one really knows. Piecing it all together, this seems to be what existed. I daresay if we were suddenly transported back in time it would produce more surprises than enough, but as yet such a journey isn't possible. It may well be some day when the scientists retrieve their digits.
 
Now, in around 1820 they tried to quarry stone here at Ringan Point. The records show this. I've sometimes wondered if the quarrying undermined the foundations of Ringan House, a Georgian mansion . One of the articles you now can't see reported a crime at the house, some maid and her fella pilfering or something in the earlier part of the 1800s. (I have all this stuff saved if you want it). However, re. the quarrying: they seemed to expect the quality of stone extracted in the Scrabo area of Newtownards, but were disappointed. The geology had suggested it was possible. If all fell flat. An article was shown on the thread with these details.
 
I know because of the disappearance of the photobucket articles you won't be able to see the historical articles found by people on here, and posted. There are several references to Ringan Point in history, the earliest being that Ninian, the representative of the Christian Church arrived in the early A.D. period and established a church here superimposing the "new" religion over the indigenous one. You probably know that our entire area has Saint Ninian connections and references.
 
It is known that what the Christian church did was to go around taking over older sites of worship established thousands of years before. Previously the people worshipped the facets of their land and the seasons: water sources, streams, hills, trees, rocks, the constellations etc. This week I have been reading a book in which a Christian Preacher gave up trying to "govern" the minds and souls of people in a certain country locale,  realising their form of worship was unspoken and largely unfathomable but a "reality" (as he called it) which they lived by- as opposed to creating ceremony around. This was as late as 1975 in a part of the U.K.! So if we see the people back then as merely accepting, on the surface, these alien beliefs in the supernatural world of the Middle East, but knowing other truths in their souls, hearts and minds, I think we won't go far wrong. And what is it about people seeking control and having to have it wholesale, lock, stock and barrel? Yes they want money an' all for the golden palaces of their brocade-wearing, jewel-bedecked leaders. All these church leaders all blinged up in foreign lands sending out envoys on a huge racket. You can't get away from the truth.
 
So the general idea is that perhaps Ninian superimposed a church on an ancient Celtic/Pagan precinct of worship somewhere on Ringan Point in the way he was ordered and instructed to do by Rome. Now this isn't an anti-catholic account, but describing a thing like this in Belfast becomes tricky. If you ask me all religion except a worship of the land has no real foundation. Especially when we are being told that the doings in the Middle East, starting off with people who lived to over a thousand years old worshipping a god who caused bushes to burn for the hell of it, is the standard to be apsired to. It's sheer, unadulterated nonsense. There is a lot more sense to be had out of Aesop's Fables. How could we be so gullible? Bullying people into these beliefs is the only answer. "You're having it, or else." However, I didn't ought to get caught up talking about that pile of crap, life's depressing enough at the moment.
 
Anyway, Ringan is a corruption of Ninian (or vice-versa).
 
Now to the interesting bit. As we know, at one time the Christians didn't like people to get an honourable burial if the deceased lay outside their faith, were unbaptised, unknown, born out of wedlock etc. etc. They didn't want such unfortunates to sully their "consecrated" ground. And anyway there was no money in it. Well, long after Ninian's church ceased to be somewhere we modern-dayers know as the area at lower Fortwilliam, the ground was deconsecrated (note that it didn't seem to matter about the Christians who had been converted and buried there in previous centuries under the auspices of the church. They were suddenly cast into discarded ground and not a coffin shifted). And so after that the deconsecrated ground was only thought fit for deaths which were considered somewhat inglorious by the church.
 
Deconsecrated ground must have posed a bit of a problem to the church. What to do with it? Yes! Stick into it unbaptised children, sailors washed up on the shore, suicides etc. All those people not deemed worthy. So, according to record and account, such unfortunates were interred somewhere at Ringan Point and then associated more with the old pagan precincts which were, of course, shunned. Oh yes. It was fitting to bury them in a place the church had withdrawn from: where older associations and connotations were resurrected. These people, then, were buried in what frankly was considered a vile place. (Anyone reading this who can argue pro-Christian needs their head examined).
 
Now to the technicalities of where this burial ground was: some of the later accounts state the burial ground at, "the  rising ground to the North of the Arches." This means somewhere about the old Mount Vernon Green area. Lately a friend of Tommytwotoes  reported he found human bones there when the land was excavated to build Mount Vernon Green – mid- twentieth century. The matter was hushed by the authorities at the time. The account is on the thread. Could they have been the sad remains of people interred for being unworthy of being buried more conventionally? It's possible.
 
Plague victims are reported to have been buried on Ringan Point also. Plagues of one kind or another seem common enough, so precisely what period of history this happened is unknown. If Mount Vernon Green was built on the old Ringan graveyard which contained plague victims, notwithstanding the inglorious burials these people had, we can only hope that the mid- twentieth century residents weren't impacted upon health-wise.
 
Interestingly, before I knew any of this I'd a friend who lived on the Green. She used to say to me that she often gazed into the networks of branches in the Winter trees on Fortwilliam Park and saw skulls. Maybe her sensibilities were picking up on the presence of people under the sward there? Sometimes I wonder if the people who planned this complex of maisonettes left a small "green" area intact in a kind of tribute. That green area being the walkway between Fortwilliam Park and Mount Vernon Park where the old trees still flourish. You probably remember the steep-banked stream there which was covered up some years ago. One of our dogs loved getting behind the grille and getting stuck. How he got in I don't know, but this is another matter: that area is littered with souterrains (underground tunnels of unknown purpose) from hundreds or thousands of years ago.
 
Over the years we have looked at accounts of the place by thread contributors whose memories of the place go back a bit, examined old accounts, considered this and that, poured over images etc. Maybe you can "catch" why it's all so compelling. It's never far from the minds of a few of us even yet, and although time and tide wait for no man maybe some day there will be Eureka moment when it will all become just a tad clearer.
 
A number of cottages once sat on the rising ground just below Mount Vernon Green. They are in the living memory of some of the contributors and some recalled the people and activities around these cottages. My own mother recalled Billy Creighton's farm and the man himself collecting swill for his pigs round the road. A curious set of steps cut into the hill at the bottom of Fortwilliam, which curiously went nowhere, have been spoken of.
 
One such homestead – the last of the cottages- which drew me in as a child was a tiny, whitewashed cottage which sat up a short lane opposite McCloy's shop. In my childhood it bore the address 276 Shore Road. In those days there was also a row of terraced houses called "Belleview Terrace" adjacent to where the post-box is at the bottom of Fortwilliam. In my day they started to demolish a lot of older houses and buildings round the road with a sort of ruthless approach to heritage, community and, yes, aesthetics. It all adds to the mystery, for no other road in Belfast seems to have been decimated to this extent, (though I imagine there'd be a few other takers for the cry of "outrage!").
 
I'm sorry if you are unable to see all the bits on the thread connected to Ringan Point. All kinds of items comprise the entire picture. Ringan Point seems to have been, even in our day, a bit of a "Devil's Elbow" type place. A liminal place- neither one thing nor the other in the manner of many strange, vague, "haunted" sort of places. Places of "dismal memory" as one article put it. But no matter how we care to view it, there is a very mysterious element to all of this. It's never far from my mind and I wonder precisely what the whole picture is. There is no doubt in my mind that the well at the bottom of Fortwilliam was once part of a centre of nature worship, and even though King Billy was said to have stopped at it, it was blocked up. Most peculiar that the powers that be would simply fill it in even though it connected to a personage considered important, culturally. (I'd like to fill some of them in). Carrickfergus got a statue to this monarch, but the Shore Road got an ancient well destroyed. And undoubtedly it preceded King Bill by centuries, if not thousands of years. Why oh why?and just to balance the books here, so to say, I don't advocate king Billyism any more than I do the palaces of Rome and its representatives.
 
The whole subject of Ringan Point is a complex and challenging issue. Once land met sea there as a natural headland projected out and in all likelihood presented a landing place for many marauders down through the centuries of recorded time, and times before that. Marauders, charlatans and persons at the vanguard of a racket come in many shapes and sizes, and those carrying crosses and a book about a lot of Middle Eastern nonsense may well have crushed underfoot the Scarlet Pimpernels and Alexanders which colonised the place after the end of the Ice Age. The people they will have subjugated will have lived in the woods which covered the area, sweeping down from Cavehill, the cry of wolves at night keeping them in tight-knit communities protected by fire. If you can get to this place in your mind, you might achieve an incoming flow of authentic information. Dreams and daydreams carry some of the biggest truths of this life. Regards, and good luck.
 
 
 

Thank you Danny and a Very Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones and the hope sanity and normality will return in 2021!!

jilly