A Scottish design on Irish land
Castle Balfour
James Balfour arrived in Fermanagh as part of the Ulster Plantation, the early-17th-century scheme to settle confiscated Gaelic lands with British colonists. He was granted the barony of Knockninny and built his castle between 1618 and 1622. The design is a Scottish T-plan - a rectangular hall block with a projecting entrance bay - the typical form for Lowland Scottish tower houses of the period, transplanted to south Fermanagh wholesale. Balfour was created 1st Baron Balfour of Glenawley in 1619. The castle passed through several hands, was used as a barracks, fell derelict, and now stands roofless at the edge of Lisnaskea, maintained by the state.
Fermanagh before the Plantation
The Maguire territory
Before the Plantation, the lands around Lisnaskea were Maguire country - the heartland of the Maguire lordship that had controlled Fermanagh for centuries. Cuconnacht Maguire was the last lord of independent Fermanagh before the Flight of the Earls in 1607 opened the county to Plantation settlement. The landscape around Upper Lough Erne, with its labyrinth of islands and channels, had made the Maguires nearly impossible to dislodge for generations. The Plantation changed all of that within a decade.
The lake the maps get wrong
Upper Lough Erne
Upper Lough Erne is more complicated than any map suggests. It is not a single lake but a chain of interconnected channels, bays and shallow spreads, broken by hundreds of drumlins - oval glacial hills - that became islands when the water rose after the ice retreated. The lough is tidal in the sense that rainfall raises and lowers it significantly across the year. Anglers have known this landscape for generations. Everyone else tends to notice it from a boat, when the islands multiply unexpectedly and the channel you were following narrows into a reed bed.