December 28th, Main Street
The 1972 bombing
A stolen car packed with explosives detonated outside the post office at around 10:30 on the night of 28 December 1972, killing Geraldine O'Reilly, fifteen, of Belturbet, and Patrick Stanley, sixteen, of Clara, Co. Offaly. Both were using the public phone box. No-one was ever charged. An RUC investigation in later years pointed toward a loyalist unit operating out of mid-Ulster, but no prosecution followed. A memorial in the centre of town carries both names. Locals will speak about it if you ask. They will not bring it up otherwise.
March 1959
The day the lines closed
Belturbet had two railways. The narrow-gauge Cavan & Leitrim ran south to Dromod and Arigna, hauling coal off the Iron Mountain in tank engines that had outlived the empire. The broad-gauge Great Northern ran east to Clones and Cavan. They met at Belturbet station, where passengers and freight changed gauge across the platform. CIÉ closed the C&L on 31 March 1959. The Great Northern branch went the same year. The station survived. The signal cabin survived. A small group of volunteers reopened the station as a museum in the 1990s and kept it from going the way of every other rural Irish station — which is to say, into a car park.
Why the cruisers turn here
An inland port
Belturbet's quay was a working river port for hundreds of years before tourism found it. Lighters carried goods up and down the Erne system to Enniskillen and beyond. When the Ballinamore-Ballyconnell Canal — the original Shannon-Erne link — was built in the 1860s, it was a commercial flop and shut within decades. Restored in 1994 as a leisure waterway, it turned Belturbet into the natural turn-around point for cruisers heading either way. The fleet at the quay in summer is mostly hire-boats from Carrick or Enniskillen. The river still does the work; it just carries different cargo.
Two foundings, one town
The motte and the planters
The motte at the top of the hill was thrown up by the Anglo-Normans in the late 12th century, probably under the de Lacys. It is still there, a green mound above the town. The town below is younger by four hundred years — chartered in 1610 under the Plantation of Ulster, settled with English and Scots, laid out on a grid that is still the grid you walk today. Belturbet ran a regular market and four annual fairs into the 19th century. The square shape of the streets is the planter's mind, the motte is the older mind, and the river is older than either.