The turning place
An tIompú Deiseal
The full Irish name of the village is An tIompú Deiseal - the right-hand turn, or more specifically the rightward (sunwise) turn. The name almost certainly derives from a natural feature: there is a pronounced bend in the Tempo River near the village, and deiseal (rightward, clockwise, sunwise) is a word loaded with old significance in Irish - turning right was the lucky, sacred direction. The more colourful explanation attributes the name to Saint Patrick, who is said to have passed through this part of Fermanagh and told a servant to turn right on the road back to retrieve a manuscript. The servant turned right. The place remembered it. The placenames researchers favour the river-bend reading, but the saint's manuscript makes a better story.
Lanyon, Emerson Tennent, and the Langham baronets
Tempo Manor
The estate at Tempo was acquired around 1815 by William Tennent, a Belfast banker. His son-in-law James - politician, traveller, and writer on Ceylon - had the present house built in 1862 and 1867 to the designs of Charles Lanyon, the architect who also built Queen's University Belfast and the Custom House. The result was a thirty-apartment Gothic manor in hammered sandstone, set in 300 acres of parkland. Sir James was created a baronet in 1867, two years before his death; the baronetcy passed to his son William, who died without a male heir. The estate passed through William's elder daughter, Ethel Sarah, who married Sir Herbert Langham, 13th Baronet, in 1893. The Langham baronets have held the connection since. Sir John Langham, 16th Baronet, is the current holder. The house stands today and operates as a wedding and events venue - the demesne still intact, if in different hands of purpose.
Born here, transported, and buried to a crowd of forty thousand
Terence Bellew MacManus
Terence Bellew MacManus was born in Tempo around 1811. As a young man he moved to Liverpool and became a successful shipping agent; in 1848 he returned to Ireland, joined the Young Irelander movement, and took part in the rebellion at Ballingarry, County Tipperary - a brief and unsuccessful rising that historians sometimes call the Battle of the Widow McCormack's Cabbage Garden. MacManus was convicted of treason, sentenced to death, then reprieved and transported for life to Van Diemen's Land. In 1852 he escaped and made his way to San Francisco, where he spent the remainder of his life unable to re-establish his career. He died in 1861 in poverty. The Fenians organised his repatriation and funeral as a deliberate political demonstration: his coffin was carried through Dublin before a crowd estimated at forty thousand, with forty thousand more watching from Abbey Street. Father Patrick Lavelle gave the oration. The man who left Tempo as an unknown merchant was buried at Glasnevin as a nationalist icon. There is, as far as can be confirmed, no memorial to him in the village of his birth.
The club that took the lords' name
Tempo Maguires
The GAA club was affiliated in 1929, taking the name Maguires to honour the old Gaelic dynasty who ruled Fermanagh from the 13th century until the Ulster Plantation of 1609. St Patrick's Park - the club's ground - was officially opened in 1957, with a crowd reported at four thousand people for a Fermanagh village with fewer than a thousand residents. The club won its first Fermanagh Senior Football Championship in 1970, retained it in 1972 and 1973, and won again in 2012. A 400-seat spectator stand, floodlit training pitches, a gym, and a community walkway followed over subsequent decades. The Irish name on the club's crest is CLG Mhic Uidhir, An tIompú Deiseal - the GAA's MacUidheir and the placename together, which is a tighter compression of the village's history than most tourist boards manage.