Dublin has nothing like it. Nor Cork nor Galway nor any other Irish city. As you approach Belfast, either on the M1 or by train, you see, it in the distance, if you happen on a clear day as last Wednesday was. The first impression is of a knob of rock jutting out of the profile of the last of the hills, before you, "a great broad amphitheatre to the north and west" of the city as, Hugh Shearman puts it in his Ulster (1949). It is the Cave Hill, of course, and in the clarity of air the other day, you could even distinguish the boulder just short of that rock; it usually carries a slogan. The preference used to be "Prepare to meet thy God" or some similar admonition. Was it an illusion that this time it was all overpainted white? White for what? Anyway, that shape at the point of the hill changes form as you come into the city. It is, you see, part of a long basalt cliff. Alice Milligan caught it earlier in the century:
Look up from the streets of the city,
Look high beyond tower and mast,
What hand of what
Titan sculptor
Smote the crags on the mountain vast?
Made when the world was fashioned,
Meant with the world to last,
The glorious face of the sleeper
That slumbers above
Belfast.
That prominent rockface is of course, Mc Art's Fort, where as everyone knows, Tone and his friends took their famous oath. Even then, the slopes below it were much frequented at holiday times by the people of Belfast. The send off for Tone on his way to America included also a dinner in a marquee in the Deer Park. For the slopes below the basalt cliff were, for generations of Belfast people, a great recreation centre.
In this century there were frequent amusements around the band stand on the level of Bellevue, a circular Floral Hall was built in the Thirties for dances, and later came the Zoo. Sean Girvan, in a booklet on the Cave Hill published by the prolific Glenravel Publications, tells us that there was a proposal to introduce a tramway system up to the top of Mc Art's Fort - about 1,000 feet high. After decades, it was finally voted out in 1910.
What was known as the Shaftesbury estate contained a lovelypine forest, and a castle. Now that is public property and the castle a fine place of resort for dancing and dining and cups of tea: Sadly, as in so many other cities today, children can no more wander unaccompanied to pick bluebells in spring, or simply wander. But the Cave Hill is still a jewel.
PS: A former headmaster of the Belfast Royal Academy told the school that Tone's younger brother Arthur was a pupil at the school for a term or two. It was then the Belfast Academy.