Uralla's cemetery was opened in the 1850s and used into the 1930s, an ordinary country burial ground of pioneers and townsfolk. Into a corner of it, on the afternoon of 29 May 1870, went the body of Fred Ward, with no headstone and no ceremony to mark him out from anyone else. It was a quiet end for a man whose name had filled newspapers for six and a half years. The silence did not last. As the colony moved toward Federation and began telling romantic stories about its bushrangers, Thunderbolt became less a criminal than a folk hero, and an unmarked grave for such a figure came to feel like an omission the district wanted to correct.

In 1914 New England residents raised a marble headstone over the grave, designed by a monumental mason named Callcott of Armidale. Its inscription is plain and revealing. 'Erected by New England residents to mark where lies Thunderbolt,' it reads, and then, almost as an afterthought in brackets, his real name: Fred Ward. Died May 25, 1870, aged 36 years. That a community would pool its money to honour a man who had robbed travellers across their own roads says a great deal about how thoroughly the outlaw had been folded into local affection. The grave sits at the southern boundary of the cemetery, now ringed by a picket fence added in 2011 and clearly signposted for the many who come looking.

No stone in this cemetery records the person who made much of Thunderbolt's freedom possible. Mary Ann Bugg was a Worimi woman, born in 1834, an expert horsewoman and bush navigator whose traditional knowledge of country kept the gang fed and ahead of the police for years. For roughly four years she was his partner and, by one account, his right-hand in everything but name. The romance industry that turned Ward into a hero shrank her to a footnote, yet her story outlasts his by decades. Long after the constable's bullet found Thunderbolt, Mary Ann lived on, raised more children, worked as a nurse, bought land, and died at Mudgee in 1905. She deserves to be remembered as more than the bushranger's shadow.

A faint mystery still hovers over the grave. Almost from the moment of his death, some questioned whether the body Constable Walker brought in was truly Thunderbolt or another man caught up in the day's events. The scar behind the dead man's left knee, from a bullet taken near Uralla in 1863, was used to confirm his identity, and most historians regard the matter as settled. But the heritage assessment notes that the remains themselves could one day yield more, that forensic examination might resolve old doubts and reveal something of how he died and how the times buried their dead. For now the marble simply marks where New England chose to lay its most famous outlaw to rest.