POLICE have visited a loyalist bonfire site in west Belfast following safety concerns over a gas cylinder on the roadside.
Photographs were sent to The Irish News which appeared to show a gas cylinder along the pavement at Lanark Way off the Shankill Road.
It was pictured beside waste ground where materials have been gathered including wooden pallets ahead of the July bonfire season.
A resident who contacted the newspaper raised safety fears over the cylinder being near a bonfire due to be lit on the Eleventh Night.
The PSNI said officers visited the area last Wednesday, but they could not locate any gas cylinders.
"While police have not received any reports, on receipt of these photographs, local officers visited the area," a spokesman said.
"They noted a build-up of rubbish and material on a vacant site, but no gas cylinders as indicated in the photographs."
Bonfire materials are already being gathered at some sites in Belfast, months before July 11.
Pallets have been stacked off Ravenhill Road on waste ground between Lismore Street and London Road, which was at the centre of bonfire tensions last year.
Belfast City Council has already removed tyres from the site in recent weeks.
Last July, 1,800 tyres were removed from the derelict land in an operation undertaken by council contractors flanked by police.
Firefighters had warned that the bonfire had the "potential for fire to spread to adjacent properties when fully complete", site visit notes uncovered by The Irish News later revealed.
Gas cylinders at bonfire sites have been an issue on previous occasions.
Records show that last year, fire crews had to remove a gas cylinder from a bonfire site at west Belfast's Conway Street – where gas cylinders had also been found the year before.
Last year there was tensions over several bonfires in the north.
In July a pyre at an east Belfast leisure centre was the focus of a stand-off with loyalists over council efforts to remove it, while in August police were injured at a bonfire site in north Belfast's mainly nationalist New Lodge area.
In December just before Christmas, trees were planted on top of a notorious UVF-linked bonfire site at east Belfast's Bloomfield Walkway as part of £190,000 landscaping works which involved flat land being changed to low hummocks.
