The restaurant that outlasted everything
Neven and Vera Maguire
Vera Maguire opened MacNean House as a small guesthouse and restaurant in Blacklion in the early 1990s. Her son Neven, who had trained in kitchens in Ireland and abroad, came home and took over the cooking. He built it steadily — television appearances, cookbook deals, a BBC series, award after award — without moving the operation. It stayed in Blacklion. The village has fewer than three hundred people and one of the most-booked restaurants in Ireland. Vera remained part of the operation. The story is about what happens when ambition and place are not in conflict.
The bridge that stopped traffic for thirty years
The Troubles checkpoint
The border between Blacklion and Belcoo was a controlled crossing during the Troubles — a checkpoint with barriers, lights, soldiers, and sometimes armour. It sat on the bridge over the small river that divides the two villages. For the people who lived here, it meant papers, delays, tension, and an interruption in ordinary life that lasted from the early 1970s until the late 1990s. The Good Friday Agreement in 1998 led to the removal of checkpoints across the border. The bridge is now unmarked. You cross it without slowing down. The generation that grew up at the checkpoint still remembers what the bridge felt like then.
The ground beneath two countries
Marble Arch Caves Geopark
The Marble Arch Caves UNESCO Global Geopark straddles the Cavan-Fermanagh border. The cave system itself is accessed from the Fermanagh side — show caves with underground rivers and dramatic limestone formations — but the geopark designation extends into Cavan. Cuilcagh Mountain is part of it. The designation recognises the geology of the whole area: the karst landscape, the disappearing rivers, the springs that emerge miles from where the water went in. The caves were formed over millions of years and contain formations that are still growing at about a cubic centimetre per century.
Engineering a path through bog
The Cuilcagh boardwalk
The Cuilcagh-Legnabrocky Trail boardwalk was constructed to solve a practical problem: the summit of Cuilcagh was being accessed by walkers who were cutting the bog surface, creating erosion channels and destroying the peat that had been forming since the last ice age. The boardwalk floats on the bog surface rather than digging into it. At the upper section, it becomes a staircase of several hundred steps rising directly up the mountain face — this is the section that photographs from directly above look like a zipper pulled through the landscape. The route is maintained jointly across the Cavan-Fermanagh boundary.