Qualla: County Fermanagh

County Fermanagh: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fermanagh is the county that does not behave. Of Northern Ireland's six counties, it is the only one that does not touch Lough Neagh, the only one with a Catholic majority among the three counties along the border, and the smallest by population by a wide margin: just 63,585 people scattered across 1,691 square kilometres of drumlins, scarpland, and lake. The Fir Manach were a Celtic offshoot of the Menapii, the only tribe Ptolemy specifically named on his second-century map of Ireland. They gave their name to two counties. Fourteen centuries later, the only piece of England's tidy plantation grid that did not quite snap into place was the one carved out of their old kingdom.

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County Fermanagh: The Lough That Halves the County

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lough Erne is not a lake. It is two lakes, a river, and somewhere around 154 islands, threaded together for fifty miles through the middle of the county like a flooded valley pretending to be a system. The Upper Lough is small and complicated, a maze of green inlets and reed beds...

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County Fermanagh: Hills, Caves, and Carboniferous Stone

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three upland areas frame the lakes. To the southwest of Lough Erne the West Fermanagh Scarplands rise to about 350 metres, a long limestone ridge that drops off sharply where the Cliffs of Magho overlook the lower lough. To the east, on the Monaghan border, the Sliabh Beagh hills...

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County Fermanagh: The Maguires and Their Undoing

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fermanagh was Maguire country for nearly four hundred years. Donn Carrach Maguire became the first recognised chief of the dynasty around 1264, and his successors held the lakelands and their portage routes through the medieval centuries. The Annals of Ulster, which covered medie...

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County Fermanagh: The Quietest County in the United Kingdom

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the Great Northern Railway closed its lines through Fermanagh in October 1957, the county became the first non-island county in the UK without a railway service. It has not regained one. That absence has shaped Fermanagh more than most outside observers notice. The county sl...

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County Fermanagh: Borders, Past and Present

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fermanagh borders five other counties: Tyrone to the northeast, Monaghan to the southeast, Cavan to the southwest, Leitrim to the west, and Donegal to the northwest. Three of those borders, the ones with Monaghan, Cavan, and Donegal, are international, marking the line between th...

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