An tIompú Deiseal · Co. Fermanagh
A drumlin crossroads east of Enniskillen, with a Victorian manor, a haunted pub, and a rebel birthplace all within walking distance.
Tempo sits in drumlin country about eight miles east of Enniskillen on the B80, at the foot of Brougher Mountain. The drumlins - those long, smoothed hills left by the last ice age - give this part of Fermanagh its particular look: a landscape of small hills and hollows, hedged fields, and roads that curve around things rather than cutting through them. The village is a working place with a Main Street, a handful of pubs, two primary schools, and a GAA ground that would not disgrace a county town.
What gives Tempo its depth is what you don't notice immediately. The manor at the south end of the village, raised to a Gothic design by Charles Lanyon in the early 1860s, was built for a family that had reinvented themselves across two generations - from Belfast bankers to Fermanagh baronets. The Emerson Tennents sold up through marriage, and the Langham baronets held the estate into the 21st century. The house and its 300-acre woods are still there, operating now as a private events venue rather than a seat of landed gentry. Its history is more interesting than its present, which is not unusual for such places.
Tempo also produced Terence Bellew MacManus, a man who left here as a young merchant, joined the 1848 rebellion in a Tipperary cabbage garden, was transported for life to Van Diemen's Land, escaped to California, and died in San Francisco without ever recovering his fortunes. His body was shipped back to Dublin and given one of the largest funeral processions the city had seen, organised by the Fenians as a political statement. Tempo does not make much of this. There is no plaque visible on the main street. The connection is there if you look for it.
Campbell's Bar on Main Street has been described as the most haunted pub in Fermanagh, a claim the Fermanagh News made in 1994 and which has not been seriously contested since. Charlie's Bar is the other Main Street option. Between the two of them and the GAA club up the road, the village has what a village of 458 people needs. No more, and no less.
