Cyprus Avenue, East Belfast

Cyprus Avenue is a tree-lined residential street in the Strandtown area of East Belfast, running between the Newtownards Road and the upper residential streets of the neighbourhood. In the 1950s and early 1960s, when Van Morrison was a teenager a short walk away on Hyndford Street, Cyprus Avenue marked a kind of social gradient: its detached houses and heavy trees represented an affluence slightly above the working-class terraces of Bloomfield, the kind of street that a boy from Hyndford Street would notice and invest with significance.

"Cyprus Avenue" is the fourth track on Astral Weeks, and it is the album's strangest and most overwhelming piece — a ten-minute stream of consciousness in which Morrison, accompanied by a jazz ensemble playing freely around his vocals, circles a scene of obsessive longing set on the avenue itself. The lyrics dissolve between the literal and the visionary in the way that is particular to him: the chestnut trees, the convent, the girl in the carriage, the sensation of being frozen in a moment outside time. The song does not resolve. It accumulates. By the end, the specificity of Cyprus Avenue — a particular street in East Belfast in a particular decade — has been transformed into something that feels like the architecture of memory itself.

Cyprus Avenue is now one of the most visited music landmarks in Belfast, a destination for Van Morrison pilgrims who come to stand on the footpath under the horse chestnut trees and attempt to locate whatever it was that produced the song. The avenue is unchanged in its basic character from the 1960s — the same trees, the same scale, the same sense of a street that is slightly set apart from its surroundings. There is no marker. There doesn't need to be.