The Lecale and Downe Historical Society's annual Summer Outing took place on Saturday 28 June, with twenty-three members and friends visiting Clifton House in Belfast, the home of the Belfast Charitable Society, which dates from 1752. The Poor House, based on the design of Robert Joy, opened in 1774 to provide relief to the growing numbers of poor people in the burgeoning town.
Following morning coffee on the way to Clifton House, the party enjoyed a tour of both the house and the New Burying Ground, which opened in 1797 and is the final resting place of many of Belfast's most famous citizens, including Mary Ann McCracken, Dr William Drennan, John Ritchie, Valentine Jones, John Templeton, Reverend William Steel Dickson and, allegedly, the reinterred remains of Henry Joy McCracken.
A delicious lunch in Horatio Todd's followed before the bus skirted the Rademon Estate to view the obelisk dedicated in 1864 to William Sharman Crawford, the reforming MP who advocated Ulster tenant right and played a leading role in the Chartist movement when serving as Member of Parliament for Rochdale. William Sharman Crawford was the subject of the Society's first talk in 2025 by his biographer, Professor Peter Gray.
