Belvoir Mausoleum, West of Belvoir Park Golf Club, 73 Church Road, Belfast, BT8 7AN

Belvoir Mausoleum

A freestanding mausoleum erected between 1765 and 1771 in the Neoclassical style by Arthur Hill-Trevor, Viscount Dungannon of Belvoir Park, as a family burial vault for himself and his wife. The mausoleum represents a relatively rare example of an eighteenth-century mausoleum built by an important local family and is of local significance.

The building occupies the site of the former medieval Breda Church and its graveyard, first recorded in 1442. Breda Church fell into ruins by 1658, when the parish was merged with Knock to form the modern Knockbreda Parish. The graveyard remained in use for burials and was enclosed by a stone wall, portions of which date from the medieval period. When Arthur Hill-Trevor acquired the Belvoir Estate (comprising over 6,000 acres on the eastern side of the Lagan), he chose to construct his family mausoleum within this historic burial ground. He was the first member of his family to be buried in it, interred there following his death on 30 January 1771. The Hill-Trevor family continued to use the mausoleum as their main burial site until Belvoir House and its lands were sold to Robert Bateson in 1811. Burials in the broader Breda graveyard continued sporadically until the 1920s, though no new interments in the mausoleum are recorded after 1811.

The mausoleum comprises a barrel vault of brick construction, fronted by an ashlar sandstone frontispiece. The frontispiece contains a segmental-headed entrance, now without its original door, and the head is finished in cement render. Originally, the frontispiece was decorated with a pediment and urns in dressed sandstone, features visible in photographs from around 1925 but removed by the 1970s. A socket for a memorial plaque surmounts the entrance, the plaque itself having been removed.

The structure has suffered considerable deterioration and vandalism. Between 1925 and circa 1935, all standing headstones in the graveyard were systematically removed, leaving only scattered fragments of broken stones in the undergrowth. In the 1950s the vault was broken into and the lead coffins of the Hill-Trevor family were stolen. The mausoleum is now heavily colonised by moss and ivy growth, with the frontispiece similarly overgrown and the pediment and blocking course absent.

The mausoleum is situated within a small walled graveyard on the perimeter of the former Belvoir Park demesne, now incorporated into Lagan Valley Regional Park and bordering Belvoir Park Golf Course. The graveyard sits in heavily wooded and overgrown ground. It is bounded to the north, west, and south by a rubble stone boundary wall with recent cement-based mortar applied to the top, together with metal security railings and barbed wire. The eastern boundary is defined by a band of mature trees and undergrowth, beyond which lies Belvoir Park Golf Course. The walling is constructed of sandstone and brick.