Belleeks
Béal Leice

The South Armagh
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Béal Leice · Co. Armagh

Planned 1790s hamlet on the Newry road. Not the pottery one.

First thing — Belleeks isn't Belleek. The pottery place is in Fermanagh, eighty miles west, makes the white china your aunt has in the good cabinet. This Belleeks — with the s — is a small Catholic hamlet on the A25 between Newtownhamilton and Newry, four miles southeast of one and seven miles west of the other. The Earl of Gosford laid it out in the 1790s on the site of an old Tudor garrison, and not a whole lot has happened to the street plan since.

It's south Armagh, so you carry the weight of that. The hills are low and green, the fields are small, the church sits above the village, and the GAA club runs the social calendar. If you're driving the A25 between Newry and Armagh City you'll be through it in under a minute. Slow down anyway — there's a story here, even if there isn't a coffee shop.

Population

~375 (2011 census)

Coords

54.16° N, 6.55° W

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Stories & lore.

The reason to come back. The things every local will eventually tell you about, usually after the second pint.

Belleeks vs Belleek

Not the pottery one

Belleek — singular, no s — is the village in Fermanagh that makes the bone china. It sits on the Erne, has a visitor centre, gets coach tours. Belleeks — with the s — is this place: a planned hamlet on a back road in south Armagh, population a few hundred, no pottery, no visitor centre, no tour buses. Same Irish root (Béal Leice, mouth of the flagstone), two very different villages. The Armagh people are tired of explaining it. So now you know.

Planned 1790s

Gosford's village

What's here today is largely the work of the Earl of Gosford, who in the 1790s laid out a planned village on the site of an old Tudor garrison. The garrison itself had been besieged and taken during Hugh O'Neill's rebellion two centuries earlier. The straight bit of street, the proportions of the houses — that's the planner's hand. You can still trace the line of the old Deerpark wall on the way east.

What Merlyn Rees called it

Bandit country

South Armagh in the 1970s through the 1990s was what the Northern Ireland Secretary Merlyn Rees called bandit country — ungovernable, watched from hilltop towers, the most dangerous posting in the world for a British soldier. Belleeks sat in the middle of it. The IRA detonated devices, including a tractor-borne bomb, in the village in the early 1990s. The towers are gone now. The memory isn't.

Getting there.

By car

On the A25 between Newtownhamilton (4 miles northwest) and Newry (7 miles east). From Armagh City it's about 30 minutes south. From Dundalk, half an hour over the border via the A29.

By bus

Translink Ulsterbus routes along the A25 corridor stop in the village on request — services are sparse. Check the timetable; don't assume.