Today, Steven Patterson, Owner of Hometown Tours hosted a free Rail to Trail tour to celebrate the European Heritage Open Day. The tour started at CS Lewis Square, we took a look at some of the cool sculptures that celebrate the books of CS Lewis. We moved across the Newtownards Road and took a look at a wall that has many times been falsely named as one of the Holywood Arches. Then, Steven brought us up the path to take a look at the site of the old Bloomfield Railway Station, and pointed out how many of the homes along the route faced the old railway line. The fascinating part of this was that he showed us a picture of the left overs of an 11th night bonfire and how the local community changed the landscape so that it would not go to wreck again. We then moved up the Comber Greenway to the North Road bridge, where Steven pointed out the differences between the old bridge from the Early-Mid 1800’s to the Newer, more concrete extension of the bridge from the 1960’s. Here, he talked about the fact that in the 1980’s, the old rail line was changed into a lake with boardwalk until the early 2000’s when Northern Ireland Water tore up the old boardwalk, drained the lake and put sewers down. However, out of this we managed to be able to get a tarmac walkway, later named the Comber Greenway. Since that day it has been used by many walkers and cyclists alike and is a great way for the locals to get a walk. We moved along to the end of the tour, where we met with folks from the Friends of Neill’s Hill, who gave us some great detail on the station and what they are doing to preserve the old platform. On my thoughts it was a great tour and a lot of knowledge and spirit went into it. Steven is a great guy and is amazing with what he does, he is very knowledgable in the local area he is from and enjoys doing tours. He also does bicycle tours which from reviews are also very worth looking for!

Stevens Website: hometowntoursbelfast.com