A 150-year silence broken in 1994
The Waterway Returns
The Shannon-Erne Waterway was built in the 1860s, a series of locks and channels connecting the two rivers. By the 1950s, it was abandoned—nobody used it, costs were high, and roads became better. It sat dry and overgrown for decades. In the 1980s, volunteers and engineers pushed for restoration. In 1994, the waterway reopened. Ballinamore was a key point—a lock, a gathering place, a pivot. Today boats move through here in summer, a traffic of slow leisure that the Victorian engineers would have recognized.