Béal Leice · Co. Fermanagh
One bridge. One pottery. Two countries sharing a very short main street.
Belleek sits exactly where the River Erne stops being a river and starts deciding it might become a lough. The village has one main street, a pottery that is older than partition, and a bridge that crosses into the Republic of Ireland so casually that if you blink you miss the sign. The Irish name, Béal Leice, means mouth of the flagstone - a reference to a limestone rock at the falls that was dynamited during drainage works in the 1880s. The flagstone is gone but the name held.
In 1849 a local landlord named John Caldwell Bloomfield inherited his father's estate and, finding that his tenants had been devastated by the Famine, looked for something useful he could do with the land. He commissioned a geological survey. The survey found feldspar, kaolin, flint and other minerals in useful quantities. Bloomfield went into partnership with London architect Robert Williams Armstrong and Dublin merchant David McBirney, and building of the pottery began in 1858. The first Parian ware - that thin, slightly luminous porcelain with the faint shell-like surface - came out of the kilns in 1863. The three founders were all dead by 1884, when a local group of investors registered the Belleek Pottery Works Company Ltd and kept it going. It is still going.
The border here has a particular texture. Belleek was one of the Catholic-majority Fermanagh villages that the 1925 Irish Boundary Commission recommended transferring to the Free State. The recommendation was never enacted. In the summer of 1922 IRA units occupied the town briefly before British Army artillery dislodged them. During the Troubles, eight people died in incidents in or around Belleek between 1972 and 1992. The bridge that now carries a steady stream of pottery tourists carried a different kind of traffic for much of the twentieth century. You can feel that history faintly, even on a quiet Tuesday.
Come for the pottery tour, which is genuinely worth the small admission charge - you will see craft workers hand-building and hand-painting pieces to the same 16-step process used since the Victorian era. Stay for the river walk in the evening, when the Erne turns flat and the swifts come out. Drive four miles east to Castle Caldwell and find the Fiddler's Stone at the forest entrance - a carved stone fiddle put there in 1770 to mark where Denis McCabe, a fiddler in the Caldwell household, fell drunk from a barge and drowned. The inscription tells you to let the living learn from the dead.