An Garastún · Co. Fermanagh
A small village on a big lake, with four fish species found nowhere else on earth.
Garrison is at the end of the road in southwest Fermanagh, where the land runs down to Lough Melvin and the county stops. The village is small - a church, a handful of houses, two pubs, and the lough stretching west toward the Leitrim hills. The Roogagh River comes through the middle of it. In terms of what's here, that is more or less it.
What makes the place significant is almost entirely underwater. Lough Melvin holds four distinct salmonid forms found nowhere else in the world: the gillaroo, a deep-bodied trout with crimson spots that feeds on lough-bottom snails; the sonaghen, a silvery, black-finned trout of the open deep water; the ferox, an ancient, cannibalistic trout that hunts other fish; and Gray's charr, a critically endangered species recorded in only a few dozen individuals since the 1970s. The genetics lab at Queen's University Belfast has spent decades working out how four separate lineages survived in one lough. The short answer involves the last ice age and a very long time undisturbed.
The village's name is blunter than its surroundings. After the Battle of Aughrim in 1691, William III established a military garrison here on the border of his new order. The soldiers are long gone. The name stayed. So did the border - this corner of Fermanagh was listed in the 1925 Boundary Commission report as territory to be transferred to the Irish Free State. The Commission's recommendations were never enacted. The border stayed where it was, running through the middle of the lough, and Garrison stayed in Northern Ireland.
Come for the fishing. Come in spring for the salmon run, in early summer for the sonaghen, through the season for the gillaroo on the dry fly in late summer. You will need a ghillie if you don't know the water. The pubs will point you to one. There is not much else going on, and that is precisely the point.
