Enniskillen

Enniskillen was my first stop in Northern Ireland. I have to admit, I had a lot of expectations about Northern Ireland, but I hardly noticed the difference at all when crossing the border. For example, there were relatively few bombs going off, and practically no gunfights at all. Overall, Northern Ireland is considerably more peaceful than one might expect.
However, my first real impressions of the town/city lfe here was strangely familiar. Enniskillen at least had a slight air of East Germany about it. It's just a bit greyer, and a bit more aware of its turbulent past.

Inside the grounds of Enniskillen Castle

The first thing I did here was visit the obligatory museum. It was quite nice, though a bit bizarre to my mind. It's located in the old castle of the city, and as such the exhibitions have to be seperated into two seperate buildings for reasons of space. The first one began with a rather mundane display of old clothing from the last hundred years or two which inexplicably passed directly into a diorama-filled section about biology and prehistory of northern ireland. After barreling through several tens of thousands of years of history the first part of this expo ended with life in the late 19th century. Now, the castle obviously has been used for military purposes quite recently, so the whole rest of the museum is strongly military in nature - giving information on the various wars Ireland has been involved in. It was all quite nice, but more something I'd expect in a museum in the US.

After the Museum I went on a tour of Lough Erne, which was quite a different experience. For one thing it took place mostly on a boat rather than in a castle.
Lough Erne is the predominant lough around Enniskillen, and the most important island nearby is Devenish island. It has a number of ruined buildings on it, mostly religious by nature. Remember how I said monks used to love punishing themselves needlessly by building churches and abbeys in hard-to-access and generally unfriendly places? This was another example. And for years it was used for local people to go to church. By boat. Then, after one boat sank and downed 19 people, the local people thought that maybe a church closer to town would be a better idea. After that the churces on the island fell into ruin.

The Round Tower on Devenish as seen
through the ruins of the church, thereby
reducing the number of photos of
monuments I have to upload.

The only other building of note on the island is the impressive round tower, which was naturally used by defense. Of course the stupid thing has been closed due to an accident which involved the staircases collapsing inside for about three years, adding yet another item to the list of things I could have climbed but didn't.