The railway that served two countries
Belcoo and Blacklion station
In 1878, a stationmaster's house and six workers' cottages were built at Belcoo in anticipation of the railway. The Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties Railway line opened on 18 March 1879 with a station named 'Belcoo and Blacklion' - the only station name in Ireland that acknowledged two villages in two different places from the start. The line ran from Enniskillen down through Leitrim to Sligo, threading through some of the poorest and most sparsely populated country in Ulster. It closed on 1 October 1957; the last trains ran through on 20 September. The station is gone. The railway bridge between the two villages was blown up by the British Army in the late 1970s, on the logic that it might be used to move arms across the border. The logic is debated. The bridge is not coming back.
The holy well at Holywell
Dabhach Phádraig
In c. 1749, traveller Isaac Butler described a well near Belcoo - called Davagh Patrick, meaning St Patrick's vat - as 'the best Cold Bath in the Kingdom', reporting that it had cured 'Numbers in nervous and paralitic Disorders'. He also recorded a 1740 incident where the water turned milky for seven weeks; a local friar attributed it to marl loosened by the thaw after a great frost. The well is at Holywell, northwest of the village, within the townlands of Cavancarragh and Rushin. The pattern, or pilgrimage gathering, runs from late July through 15 August annually. Máire MacNeill, in her 1962 study 'The Festival of Lughnasa', connected the site to a local folktale about a hound whose mouth emitted fire before St Patrick killed it - a trace, she argued, of pre-Christian rites absorbed into the feast of Lughnasa. The water is still cold.
Partition, 1921
The border and its geometry
With the partition of Ireland in 1921, Belcoo became a border village overnight. It was overwhelmingly Catholic - as the 2011 census still showed, almost ninety per cent - and the Irish Boundary Commission of 1925 listed it among the villages that would have been transferred to the Irish Free State had its recommendations been enacted. They were not. For the next seven decades the crossing was subject to customs checks, military observation, and periodic closure. During the War of Independence, fifty IRA volunteers crossed from Cavan in March 1922 and seized the RIC barracks in Belcoo after a three-hour battle. After the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 the checkpoints came down and the road through became a road again. The European Union's open-border policy made crossing it the same unremarkable act it was before 1921. This is not taken entirely for granted here.
Canvas boat, magnesium flares
Marble Arch, 1895
French speleologist Édouard-Alfred Martel and Dublin naturalist Lyster Jameson first explored the Marble Arch cave system in 1895, travelling by canvas boat on the underground Cladagh River with candles and magnesium flares. They mapped 300 metres of passage and noted the junction where three rivers meet. Martel immediately saw the potential for a show cave. It took ninety years. Development began in 1982 and the cave opened to the public on 29 May 1985. The route through the show cave still begins the same way Martel went in - by boat. In 2001, the caves and Cuilcagh Mountain Park became a European Geopark, the first in the UK to be recognised by the European Geoparks Network. In 2004, under an agreement between the EGN and UNESCO, the park joined the Global Network of National Geoparks. In 2008 the geopark boundary was extended across the border into County Cavan, making it the world's first transnational cross-border geopark.