Tag: Barney Devine
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Cuilcagh Pilgrimage
A Cuilcagh Camino route providing community access to sites and monuments on the stunning, but often forgotten, east Cuilcagh landscape.
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A Master Map Maker
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…
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First Among Equals
Fermanagh and Omagh District Council has opened a consultation on its Draft Heritage Plan 2025-2030. It is a first for FODC and is undoubtedly to be welcomed, as is the appointment, two years ago, of a heritage officer. The consultation is not being conducted through open public meetings which would have given it more energy…
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Willie Lunney’s Turning Point
I am intrigued by the idea of this man who, through his connection to the southwest Fermanagh landscape, epitomised toil, risk and innovation in a time of great industrial change a hundred and fifty years ago. All we know about Willie Lunney comes from a scrap of oral folk memory, but it’s enough to inform…
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Plus ça Change…?
With increasing horror and helplessness we are bystanders to a daily slaughter of forsaken peoples in conflicts around the world which involve the most savage, shameless and cynical use of gruesome weapons aimed directly at civilians. Mass bombing and even starvation have become weapons of war. Appalling acts of needless cruelty inflicted on non-combatants by…
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Slieve Rushen’s Lost Millstones
Slieve Rushen is a place apart. From its 1200 ft summit the view of the surrounding countryside is exhilarating. From here its massif, imagined as an island, rises above a lowland green sea, its broad summit enabling and unifying rather than impeding communications between the surrounding small settlements strung around its base, their backs to…
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Living Cheek By Jowl
Despite its poor state of preservation I have rarely come across an ancient monument so intriguing. Its location and appearance were counter intuitive and out of context. Moreover, it shouldn’t have been there. I had checked the heritage map before I started out, and there were no scheduled sites of any kind indicated for this…
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Scratchings In The Dark
After four visits, I still don’t fully understand this place, nor have I found any hard evidence that it was used as a hide-out during the 1920/21 War of Independence. Indeed, had I lived near it at the time, I would probably have had no knowledge of its existence and purpose given its remote location.…
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Atlantic Rock Art
The dog had to be walked, but given the day that was in it, I wasn’t enthusiastic about going out. A grey membrane of cloud hung low over the hills of southwest Fermanagh. It was wet and dreary. I was indecisive about where to go. Then I remembered a route I had been meaning to…
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Stone Shapers and Shifters
To the west, we enjoyed a panoramic view of Cuilcagh, Benaughlin and the Iron Mountains. The villages of Bawnboy and Swanlinbar were hidden below by the fall of the land. At 1200 feet high, the surrounding moorland landscape, with its winter colour palette of burnt umber and rusts, did not appear at first to be…
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A Trannish Island Mystery
Most of us know, like an article of faith, the tune and chorus by heart. It is old, but it is beautiful, and its colours they are fine, It was worn at Derry, Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne. My father wore it as a youth in bygone days of yore, And on the Twelfth, I love to wear…
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Made To Measure
It caught my eye in an instant. I back tracked. Close to the roadside fence near Lough Lattone on the Fermanagh Leitrim border was a crow’s foot, or Ordnance Survey benchmark chiselled onto the surface of an exposed slab of bedrock. I regularly cycle this route but had failed to see it until now. I later checked an…
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From Newtown to No Town
Our landscapes today are peppered with monuments such as megalithic tombs, castles, churches and period houses, whilst other important relicts such as old roads, remain invisible and forgotten. Despite once being an essential part of our built, social and commercial heritage, they remain unseen even to those who live close to them. Once at the…
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News From Afar
The entry in the Annals of Ulster was concise: 720 A.D. Theodore reigned one year. A few numerals and words were all that were needed to record the short rule of Theodosius III, Emperor of the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople from 715-17 A.D. This entry, and another about the first Viking raid along the north coast of…
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Wine Red Waters and Ladder Fields
I was searching recently along the western flanks of Slieve Rushen on the Fermanagh side of the Cavan border for an ancient well, the waters of which turn wine-red every seventh year on 23rd June. After finding the spring and a colourless stream (not surprising really as I was two months early for the anticipated event),…
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Walking a Mile in Their Shoes
“Through here is the refractory. Note the heavy iron door and locking mechanism.” I was confused. Did she say refectory? I know what a refectory is, and what I was being shown didn’t fit with my experience of a boarding school dining hall with its rules governing the disciplined distribution and consumption of food. In…
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House of Neachtain
Sometimes I come across places that don’t quite add up, like an early lost church site I visited recently. Hidden within dense forestry it proved difficult to access and I was beaten back on two occasions by heavy undergrowth. Finally, on a third attempt, I stumbled out into a large open glade, about half an…
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Village Pump Politics
Following a recent public comment by a local politician about his concerns regarding the proposed withdrawal of emergency surgical services from Enniskillen hospital, a Health spokesperson accused him of engaging in village pump politics, and by implication, that he (the politician) was an uninformed gossip who listened to too much parochial tittle tattle. I took…
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A Battle of Everywhere and Nowhere
Ideas of heritage and culture are born out of meanings we attach to landscapes, events, sites, and monuments. The Battle of Newtownbutler (31st July 1689) is one such event that occurred within the drowned drumlin landscape of Upper Lough Erne. Coming near the end of a merciless century in which up to half a million died…
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Men Who Eat Crannogs
The construction of a bypass a decade ago on the A32 Enniskillen Cherrymount link road caused the partial destruction of Drumclay crannog and triggered a massive, costly (£2.5m), and hasty archaeological rescue excavation, which uncovered the richest finds anywhere associated with this type of medieval dwelling in Ireland. The crannog, occupied from the 6th or 7th century to the 17th century, revealed layers of occupation…