A church founded before 632
St Mogue and the monastery
Saint Máedóc of Ferns - known locally as Mogue, or Mo Aodh Óg - founded a church on the southern shore of Lough Melvin and died in this part of Leitrim around the year 632. He is said to have appointed Fearghus Mac Ailill as his successor and first abbot. The monastery that grew up here, later an Augustinian house sometimes called Gubalaun Abbey, lasted until the Dissolution in the 16th century. What survives is the ruined medieval church of St Mogue and the graveyard around it, which holds Early Christian cross-slabs, rock art and a 9th-century grave slab. The east window of the ruin is later than the saint, 13th-century in style, so the stones you see were built and rebuilt over centuries on the same holy ground. The Catholic parish church, St Aidan's, was built in 1831 to 1832 after the old chapel collapsed during Mass in the winter of 1829.
Relicts of the last ice age
Lough Melvin's three trout
Lough Melvin is internationally known among fish biologists because it holds three distinct trout - the gillaroo, the sonaghan and the ferox - living together in one lake. The gillaroo feeds on the lake bed and is heavily spotted and golden; the sonaghan is a darker, deep-water fish; the ferox is a long-lived predator. They are thought to be separate relict populations that colonised the lough after the last glaciation and never interbred away their differences. Add spring salmon, running from February, and ordinary brown trout, and you have one of Ireland's most studied and most prized angling waters. Fishing is run off the lough; boats and ghillies work the Leitrim and Fermanagh shores alike.
Captain de Cuéllar at Rosclogher, 1588
The Armada on the lough
When the Spanish Armada broke up on the Irish coast in the autumn of 1588, the Gaelic lord MacClancy gave shelter on Lough Melvin to a band of survivors. Among them was Captain Francisco de Cuéllar, who had already escaped shipwreck in Sligo. He spent roughly three months at MacClancy's island castle of Rosclogher on the lough, helped defend it against an English force sent by Bingham, and was reportedly offered the lord's sister in marriage before he made his way north to Ulster and eventually home. The narrative letter de Cuéllar wrote about his ordeal is one of the most vivid outside accounts of Gaelic Ireland that survives. MacClancy was caught and beheaded in 1590; O'Rourke, who had also sheltered Spaniards, was hanged in London the same year. The castle ruin still stands on its rock in the lough.