Tucked away in a corner of Enniskillen Library are three large wall-mounted streetscape panels showing side-view elevations of houses, shops, churches and civic buildings fronting onto several streets of Enniskillen. They represent, in two-dimensional form, an architectural, spatial and historical record of 330 buildings from 1862 to 2018 and include names of 5,000 tenants and business owners who lived and traded there. A group of smaller panels show many significant changes to the town’s historic built environment. Together, they form the core of a much-anticipated exhibition entitled Enniskillen Streetscape. Launched on 31st May 2025 as part of the Barton Wine Geese Festival, the uncommissioned and unfunded mapping project is a remarkable solo voluntary endeavour and brainchild of local man Gaby Burns who, over a seven-year period, researched, designed and produced it.
The centrepiece banners that dominate the exhibition present an exhilarating viewing experience which transforms the exhibition into a visual delight of written and architectural complexity, symmetry and perspective not unlike the work of Dutch graphic artist Maurits Escher. It simply takes your breath away.
The first panel shows the central thoroughfare of the island town which links West Bridge to East Bridge along Anne Street, Darling Street, Church Street, High Street, the Diamond, Townhall Street and East Bridge Street. The second panel starts at East Bridge and moves eastward along Belmore Street and Fort Hill Street, and the third presents the buildings on Queen Street and Market Street. An additional thirty panels contain maps showing the development of the town. Those relating to the construction of the bridges are particularly interesting.
Presenting detailed changes over a period of 160 years can be challenging. The technique used here was to present each street as two streetscapes, one on top of the other and colour-coded to represent two different time periods, with another two rows of buildings mirror-imaged below for the same streetscape on the opposite side of the street but flowing in a different direction.
The top rows of streets are coloured blue and represent 19th century buildings, many of which are unchanged. Their construction can be dated from significant changes in rateable value in the Revision Books, particularly when thatched single story houses were replaced. Whilst their original windows and roofs remain their shopfronts have constantly changed over the decades and have been redrawn from available old photos, notably those from the Lawrence Collection, and incorporated into displayed shopfronts. To ensure that this level of detail was maintained the frontage of present-day buildings was copied from contemporary photos, and these are shown in black in rows underneath. Where 19thcentury buildings have been replaced by modern 20th century buildings these are shown in red along with their dates of construction.
With such an enormous amount of detail to comprehend, I found that the easiest way for me to navigate the maps was simply to identify a landmark civic building such as the Town Hall from where I wandered virtually through time and space along a familiar but miniaturised, urban landscape. With my mental mini tour completed, I wondered at the mind of the maker who made these unique maps.
As far as I am aware, the only other similar project in Ireland that traces the origin, growth and change of urban development through digitised maps is the Irish Historic Towns Atlas produced by the Royal Irish Academy. Its focus, however, is to collate and layer already available maps of towns to show changes over time. In contrast, these Enniskillen maps bring a more creative mix of skills to the task, ranging between disciplines including contemporary digital mapping, urban geography, spatial humanities, historic urban landscape architecture and local history. The enormity and complexity of the research behind the Enniskillen exhibition is quite remarkable, as are the technical challenges such as the straightening of winding streets to take out their curves, and the redrawing of many of its buildings.
Gaby Burns hails from a well-known Enniskillen family. Indeed, their transgenerational family business, Charlie’s Bar, is included on the map. His main career was as an instructor at Gortatole Outdoor Education Centre in Fermanagh, where he developed a love of caving and from where he began to digitally survey underground cave systems beneath Cuilcagh Mountain. These were subsequently published in book form by the local caving group. With his late fieldwork companion Jim Nolan, he explored and mapped much of the above-ground archaeological, geographical and cultural mountain landscapes of the Cavan Burren for many years, discovering a portfolio of prehistoric sites and monuments, including Neolithic Rock Art and boulder monuments. This exhibition clearly demonstrates that the skills and experience he attained in our upland, and often-forgotten, places have been put to good use in his reimagining of this contemporary urban townscape.
Importantly, Burns represents a continuation of a long tradition of amateur scholarship in Fermanagh. He can legitimately be considered a neo-antiquarian who clearly holds his own among former antiquarians stretching back through the 19th and 20th centuries who were mostly self-taught scholars with a fascination for local history, folklore, archaeology, botany, geology and the collection of artefacts. From the 1840s to the 1950s, they developed the study of our past, influenced the development of our museums and shaped academic disciplines in modern universities. They included William Wakeman, who taught at Portora School for twenty years; the 3rd Earl of Enniskillen; the 4th Earl of Belmore; Lady Dorothy Lowry Cowrie; Rev James E. McKenna; Thomas Plunkett and more recently, Johnny McKeagney.
Burns undoubtedly comes out of the same mould as our antiquarian antecedents who, like a great deal of their studies, have since been left out of the current rigidly defined disciplines by professional academics. This rejection is a bonus for local specialists like Burns, as it has freed him up to develop, unencumbered, his own style of evidence-based voluntary research and scholarship.
By marrying his map-making skills to the intimate knowledge that can only come from a lived experience of this place, he has produced a deep map like no other and has shone a light on the social and commercial life of old Enniskillen. There will undoubtedly be a great deal of public interest in this exhibition. The local Chamber of Commerce or Fermanagh and Omagh District Council through its nascent heritage plan, could support local people and groups to put more flesh on the bones of the names and businesses through reminiscence activities such as the collection of old videos, recordings and genealogies to create narratives not unlike those produced by the writer and map-maker Tim Robinson on his journeys through Connemara and the Burren.
The writer Lawrence Durrell suggested that people are moulded by places where they live. This may be achieved by communion with their landscapes, which enquires, “All landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper: I am watching you – are you watching yourself in me?”
I suspect Gaby is.
The exhibition continues until Thursday 26th June 2025.
The exhibition can be downloaded for free at cavanburren.ie. The Revision Books and several videos of presentation animations are also available for download, as is the previously published research on ancient sites and monuments from the Cavan Burren area of west Cavan and southwest Fermanagh. A longer version of this article can be accessed on Barney’s Blog: http://www.barneydevine.com/.
Sources: Linda Lappin: Mapping the Soul of Place & Lawrence Durrell: The Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel
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