The Skipper & Her Mate by Nicki Griffin

Author:Nicki Griffin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Island Publishing
Published: 2013-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

A week later, and we were chasing the HBA boats again. They’d gone to Belleek on the Fermanagh-Donegal border at the limit of the Erne Navigation after a stop in Enniskillen to show themselves off and attract attention to the waterways, but we’d been playing tunes at the Feakle Festival back home in Co. Clare. It’s a long way from Quivvy to Belleek when seven knots is pretty much your top speed, and we had to negotiate the intricacies of Upper Lough Erne. It’s a maze of channels and islands, with inlets masquerading as deep water waiting to capture you in their shallows. I was at the helm with the binoculars trying to make out the numbers on distant markers.

‘Is that 33J or 33H?’ I passed the binoculars to Joe.

‘32D.’

‘32D? Shit. How can it be 32D?’ It was that perspective thing again. The chart was small and flat. The lake was open and filled with obstacles.

After two hours of almost getting lost, it was a relief to see on the chart that the lake was about to split into two narrow channels that would weave and divide and finally join into one just before Enniskillen. It looked shorter to go via Carrybridge past the island of Belle Isle, a place that has been inhabited since the eleventh century. The earliest inhabitants were the MacManus clan – in those days the island was called, imaginatively, Ballymacmanus – and they were a scholarly lot. Cathal Óg MacManus, cleric, chieftain and scholar, who died in 1498, was one of the compilers of the Annals of Ulster, a chronicle of Irish affairs that spanned the years between 431 and 1540.

By the early eighteenth century, Belle Isle had become a major estate owned by the Gore family. Sir Ralph Gore built a house and created a garden that dipped its toes in the lake, but in 1830 the property was sold to the Reverend John Porter from England. It was the Porter family who built Belle Isle into the place it is today, extending the house and adding a tower. The Reverend’s son, John Grey Porter, put the steamships SS Belturbet and SS Knockninny Rock onto the lake. These boats ran a regular public service between Kilconny Quay in Belturbet and Knockninny, where he’d built a hotel, and on to Enniskillen.

Today, the house is owned by the Duke of Abercorn and is called a castle – amazing what a tower can do for a place – and you can rent it out for up to fourteen people if you’re feeling particularly celebratory and flush. There’s also a cookery school where you can do an intensive four-week course and gain a diploma, or, if you’re corporate, it will give you a day of team building – preferable, I would think, to panting round a forest firing paint balls at each other.

The river wound its way through Carrybridge and on into Enniskillen. We kept going along Broad Meadow, past the castle, under two road bridges, past the

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