Enniskillen Royal Grammar School has existed only since 1 September 2016, but its roots reach back to a royal charter granted by James I in 1608, two years before the Plantation of Ulster proper began. The new school is the legal merger of Portora Royal School, the all-boys institution where Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, and Henry Francis Lyte all sat their lessons, and the Enniskillen Collegiate Grammar School, which had educated girls in the town since 1916. The amalgamation was fought all the way to the High Court. The court let it proceed. The new school now operates on two campuses divided by the River Erne, one above the lough and one in the heart of town, while the architects draw plans for the single campus that one day will replace them both.
Portora Royal School was one of the public schools founded by royal charter in 1608, when James I authorised similar foundations across the newly planted Ulster counties. Originally called Enniskillen Royal School, it opened around 1618 at Ballybalfour, about fifteen miles outside the town. It moved into Enniskillen itself in 1661, and not until 1778 did it find its final home on Portora Hill, the wooded knoll on the western edge of town where the long Georgian schoolhouse and the boathouse below it became, for the next two and a half centuries, simply Portora. The school took both boarders and day boys for most of its life and converted to day-only in the 1990s. Its alumni list is one of the strangest in Irish education: Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Henry Francis Lyte who wrote Abide With Me, the playwright Ciaran McMenamin, the singer Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, the actor Adrian Dunbar, and the industrialist James Gamble who co-founded Procter and Gamble. The hill produced unusually well.
The Enniskillen Collegiate Grammar School began in 1916 as the Enniskillen Royal School for Girls and took its later name when the Fermanagh Regional Education Committee took control in 1925. Its purpose-built campus on the eastern side of town opened in October 1931, with eighty-eight pupils and four classrooms. It was the first grammar school in the province ever erected by a public body, a small detail that mattered enormously in a place where almost every grammar education was either private or church-run. By the time the school closed in 2016, roughly 500 girls aged 11 to 18 were studying there, with extensions stitched onto the original 1931 building like layers of geological sediment. Its final principal, Elizabeth Armstrong, would walk across town to become the first principal of the new amalgamated school.
The Department of Education's proposal to merge Portora and the Collegiate into a single, co-educational, non-denominational grammar called Enniskillen Royal Grammar School was approved by Minister of Education John O'Dowd in June 2015. Local opposition was significant. In October 2015 the matter went to the High Court in Belfast as objectors tried to stop the amalgamation entirely. The High Court rejected the bid in February 2016. Portora and the Collegiate closed at the end of the 2015 to 2016 academic year. On 1 September 2016, ERGS opened its doors. For the time being, classes happen on both legacy sites: the boys' classrooms and rowing facilities at Lough Shore on Portora Hill, the rest of the school at the former Collegiate site in east Enniskillen. The long-term plan is a single new building on the Portora site, but Northern Ireland educational capital projects move on geological time.
Drop below Portora Hill and you arrive at the Portora Boat House on the shore of Lough Erne. This is where the school's rowing club, the part of the institution that produces consistent national-level results, lives. The club takes students from every school in the area, not just ERGS itself, and runs eight regular volunteer coaches alongside head coach Derek Holland, a former Irish Olympic rower. Another of the coaching team, Iain Kennedy, is also a former Olympian. In 2017 the Chairman of Fermanagh and Omagh District Council, Stephen McCann, presented Holland with a trophy at Enniskillen Castle Museum to mark the club's record of success. The boats train out of a lake that has produced world-champion oarswomen like Holly Nixon and a steady stream of Irish international rowers. Lough Erne is more open water than most British rowing clubs ever see, and the conditions show in the athletes.
Walk between the two campuses on a school morning and you cross the river that the town sits on. On one side, Portora's Georgian buildings remember the names that hung in the corridors. On the other, the Collegiate's 1931 facade still carries the faint air of inter-war ambition. Behind the entrance gates of both, the new ERGS crest is fixed up alongside the old ones. Year 8 pupils study Art, Drama, English, French, Games, Geography, History, Home Economics, IT, Maths, Music, PE, Science, and Technology and Design in their first year, the lineage of a curriculum that James I would not have recognised but Oscar Wilde almost would. The school has not yet built its single replacement campus. When it does, the architects have already been instructed that the boathouse at the foot of Portora Hill stays exactly where it is.
The school operates on two sites in Enniskillen. The Lough Shore (former Portora) campus is at approximately 54.3525°N, 7.6498°W on the western edge of town, recognisable by the long Georgian schoolhouse on the wooded ridge above Lough Erne and the boat house below it on the lakeshore. The Collegiate site is in eastern Enniskillen at roughly 54.3513°N, 7.6545°W. From the air the town itself is the bowtie of land between the Upper and Lower Lough Erne. St Angelo Airport (EGAB) is 4 miles north. Belfast (EGAA) lies 75 nautical miles east; Donegal (EIDL) is 35 nautical miles northwest. Atlantic maritime conditions prevail year round.