An Machaire · Co. Armagh
Where the Blackwater meets Lough Neagh - and a wooded island a kilometre offshore holds eight thousand years of stories.
Maghery is a small village on the south-west corner of Lough Neagh, where the River Blackwater finishes its run and empties into the lake. A few hundred people live here. The Ordnance Survey Memoirs of 1835 describe sixteen one-storey thatched houses scattered along the shore and called it a fishing village. The houses have changed; the description hasn't really.
The lake in front of the village is the largest in Ireland and the largest in Britain - about 383 square kilometres of fresh water, shallow as a soup plate, and the source of more than forty per cent of Northern Ireland's drinking water. It also holds Europe's biggest commercial eel fishery. The fishermen's co-op is headquartered up at Toome on the Antrim shore, but the boats and the families work the whole lake, and Maghery is one of the historic shore villages the trade was built out of.
A kilometre offshore sits Coney Island - nine wooded acres with eight thousand years of human story under the trees. Mesolithic flints, a Norman motte, a 16th-century stone tower built by Shane O'Neill as a treasure store, a viscount's tomb. The National Trust owns it; the council manages it; a single caretaker lives on it. Boats run from the Country Park jetty at weekends from late spring to early autumn.
What you come for is the lake itself. The Country Park, the jetty, the canoe trail, the path along the Blackwater, the slow strange feeling of a horizon of water in the middle of Ulster. There's no hotel and no real restaurant. Bring a flask. Take your time.
