The most apt of names
BELLE ISLE is a house that perfectly answers its name. It stands in a wonderful situation on the shore of an island at the northern end of Upper Lough Erne. With a busy outline of gables and dominated by a narrow tower, it has a romantic, castle-like air today (Fig 2). Surviving in the heart of this building, however, is a small and relatively modest Georgian house, which was constructed in about 1717 as the centrepiece to an ambitious planned landscape that enjoyed a spell of 18th-century celebrity. The rich and intriguing history of the place was explored by Dr A. P. W. Malcomson, in his account of Belle Isle in the Clogher Record (1998).
On September 4, 1607, the Gaelic Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell set sail from Rathmullan, Co Donegal, in search of Spanish support in their long-running conflict with the English Crown. The so-called Flight of the Earls proved to be a disastrous political miscalculation. James I swiftly declared the estates of the refugee earls forfeit and intensified the process of colonising Ulster with a new Protestant population drawn from England and Scotland.
One of
