# Enniskillen Castle

castle

Enniskillen, United Kingdom

Fortification. 1428 CE

## Story

• Hugh the Hospitable Maguire is credited with a stronghold at Enniskillen in the 1420s, and other accounts place the building in 1428 or in the sixteenth century.
• The castle stands on the River Erne in County Fermanagh, on an island and a ford that the Maguires fortified as their chief seat.
• John Dowdall took the castle by water in February 1594, and in May 1595 the English garrison was killed after surrendering.
• William Cole repaired the keep, finished the twin-turreted Watergate by 1614, and bought the castle in 1623.
• From 1796 the site was Castle Barracks, and it now holds Fermanagh County Museum and the Inniskillings Museum.

## Visiting

Admission to the historic castle site and the museum displays is by ticket. An adult ticket is £6.50, a child ticket is £4.50, and a student or senior concession ticket is £4.50. Admission for children under 5 years is free. A family ticket for 2 adults and 3 children is £16.50.
These ticket prices apply until 31 March 2027. The castle is open from 9.30am to 5.00pm, Monday to Friday. The visitor centre opens at 9.30am and the museum galleries open at 10:00am. On Saturdays the site is open from 11.00am to 5.00pm.
On Sundays in June, July, August and September the site is open from 11.00am to 5.00pm. On bank holidays in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland, apart from the Christmas period, the castle is open from 9:30am to 5.00pm.

## History

Enniskillen Castle stands on a bend of the River Erne in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, where the water narrows between the upper and lower loughs. The ground was a ford and a small island before the Maguires built there. Hugh the Hospitable is credited with a stronghold in the 1420s, before his death in 1428, while other accounts place the building in 1428, in the fifteenth century, or in the sixteenth century.

An annal for 1439 gives the castle of Inis-Ceithlenn to Donal Mag Uidhir, and in the same year King Tomas Óg Maguire was held in his own castle by Domnall Maguire the Freckled. Hugh O’Donnell took the castle in 1508 and then burned it, and O’Neill destroyed it again in 1538 with English soldiers and ordnance.

In 1593 a later Hugh Maguire met Hugh Roe O’Donnell and other nobles in the castle and rebelled after the sheriff Humphrey Willis pillaged Fermanagh. John Dowdall took the castle from the water in February 1594, and the defenders were killed after they surrendered. The Irish blockaded the English garrison, defeated a relief at the Ford of the Biscuits on 7 August, and received six months of supplies from William Russell by 30 August. In May 1595 that garrison surrendered and was massacred, though another sequence places an English capture in September 1595 and a Maguire recovery in 1596.

Hugh Maguire was killed near Cork on 4 March 1599. By 1602 Niall Garbh O’Donnell had destroyed Enniskillen, and Cuchonnacht is also said to have raised the castle so the English could not use it. William Cole, given command in 1607 or made constable in 1609, repaired the keep, finished the twin-turreted Watergate by 1614, and bought the castle in 1623. The name Watergate is recent, and the building was never a gate to the river.

During the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Rory Maguire besieged the castle without success after failing to trap Cole at Crevenish. Cole’s own garrison imprisoned him in the castle in January 1649 and then released him. In 1796 the site was rebuilt as Castle Barracks for £7,000. The 27th Regiment of Foot was at home there in 1853, moved to Omagh in 1875, and on 1 July 1881 became part of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.

The castle now holds Fermanagh County Museum and the Inniskillings Museum, with displays of Belleek Pottery and of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards. A visitor centre opened in 2016. Excavation in 1990 found the pre-castle ford, and a 2006 evaluation inside the keep found a dressed stone wall under later floors. One account closes the barracks in 1927, and another keeps them in military use until 1950, including a base for the North Irish Horse from November 1939.

## Photographs

- [The Watergate at Enniskillen Castle — Raymond Millar](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Enniskillen_Castle.jpg)
- [Enniskillen (from the Irish: Inis Ceithleann meaning "Kathleen's Island") is the county town (and largest town) in County Fermanagh and the west of Northern — Jule_Berlin from Berlin, Germany](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Enniskillen_Castle_01.jpg)
- [Enniskillen Castle, Enniskillen, condado de Fermanagh, Irlanda del Norte — Ramón from Llanera, España](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Enniskillen_Castle_02.jpg)
- [Enniskillen Castle — Marian McCaffrey](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Enniskillen_Castle_03.jpg)
- [Enniskillen Castle — Marian McCaffrey](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Enniskillen_Castle_04.jpg)
- [Enniskillen Castle, Enniskillen, condado de Fermanagh, Irlanda del Norte — Ramón from Llanera, España](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Enniskillen_Castle_05.jpg)
- [Enniskillen Castle, Enniskillen, condado de Fermanagh, Irlanda del Norte — Ramón from Llanera, España](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Enniskillen_Castle1.jpg)
- [Enniskillen Castle, Enniskillen, condado de Fermanagh, Irlanda del Norte — Ramón from Llanera, España](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Enniskillen_Castle2.jpg)
- [Enniskillen Castle Taken from a cruiser on the River Erne travelling towards Enniskillen — Terry Stewart](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Enniskillen_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_507880.jpg)
- [Enniskillen Castle Looking north, Enniskillen Castle, situated beside the River Erne in County Fermanagh, was built almost 600 years ago by Gaelic Maguire — Kenneth Allen](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Enniskillen_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1306948.jpg)

## Sources

- [The Maguire Story](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/fermanagh-stories/the-maguire-story/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Attacks on Enniskillen Castle](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/fermanagh-stories/the-maguire-story/attacks/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Nine Years War](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/fermanagh-stories/the-maguire-story/nine-years-war/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Watergate](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/explore-the-castle/castle-history/watergate/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Castle Keep](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/explore-the-castle/castle-history/castle-keep/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Barrack Coach House](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/explore-the-castle/castle-history/barrack-coach-house/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Curved Range](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/explore-the-castle/castle-history/curved-range/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Castle Garden](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/explore-the-castle/castle-history/castle-garden/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Castle History](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/explore-the-castle/castle-history/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Crevenish Castle](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/fermanagh-stories/plantation-in-fermanagh/plantation-castles-in-fermanagh/crevenish-castle/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Enniskillen Castle in the Plantation](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/fermanagh-stories/plantation-in-fermanagh/plantation-castles-in-fermanagh/enniskillen-castle/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Opening hours](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/homepage/visit/opening-hours/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Visit the Castle](https://www.enniskillencastle.co.uk/event/visit-the-castle/) — Enniskillen Castle
- [Enniskillen Castle](https://www.communities-ni.gov.uk/heritage-sites/enniskillen-castle) — Department for Communities
- [1990:053 Castle Barracks, Enniskillen](https://excavations.ie/report/1990/Fermanagh/0000988/) — Excavations.ie
- [2006:723 Enniskillen Castle](https://excavations.ie/report/2006/Fermanagh/0015468/) — Excavations.ie
- [Living at Drumclay](https://www.fermanaghomagh.com/article/new-exhibition-reveals-the-remarkable-story-of-life-at-drumclay-crannog/) — Fermanagh and Omagh District Council
- [Enniskillen Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enniskillen_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Siege of Enniskillen (1594)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Enniskillen_(1594)) — Wikipedia
- [Hugh Maguire (Lord of Fermanagh)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Maguire_(Lord_of_Fermanagh)) — Wikipedia
- [William Cole (planter)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cole_(planter)) — Wikipedia
- [Irish Rebellion of 1641](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Rebellion_of_1641) — Wikipedia
- [Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Inniskilling_Fusiliers) — Wikipedia
- [North Irish Horse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Irish_Horse) — Wikipedia
- [Belleek Pottery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belleek_Pottery) — Wikipedia
- [Enniskillen Castle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enniskillen_Castle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Enniskillen Castle 01.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enniskillen_Castle_01.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Enniskillen Castle 02.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enniskillen_Castle_02.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Enniskillen Castle 03.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enniskillen_Castle_03.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Enniskillen Castle 04.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enniskillen_Castle_04.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Enniskillen Castle 05.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enniskillen_Castle_05.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Enniskillen Castle1.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enniskillen_Castle1.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Enniskillen Castle2.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enniskillen_Castle2.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Enniskillen Castle - geograph.org.uk - 507880.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enniskillen_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_507880.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Enniskillen Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1306948.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enniskillen_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1306948.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Enniskillen Castle stands on a bend of the River Erne, on the west side of the island that later carried the Plantation town of Enniskillen, in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. The place commands the narrow water between Upper and Lower Lough Erne, and it has been described as guarding one of the few passes into Ulster. The Irish name of the island town is Inis Ceithleann, Ceithleann's island, also rendered Inis-Ceithlenn and explained as the island of Kathleen. The annals that first name the castle were kept at Belle Isle on Lough Erne, near Lisbellaw, and they cover the years from 431 to 1540. County Fermanagh takes its name from Fir Manach, the men of Manach. It is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland, one of the nine counties of Ulster, and Enniskillen is its county town. Nearly a third of the county is water. The Erne was treated in the early ninth century as a boundary between Connacht and Ulster.

The ground under the later barracks was a crossing before it was a castle. An excavation in the car park, directed by Eoin Halpin and funded by Fermanagh District Council, was carried out over six weeks in January and February 1990 in advance of a museum and offices. It opened a cutting 15 metres long and 4 metres wide, about a fifth of the development area. The earliest deposits were read as belonging to a time before the castle, before 1400, when people used the spot simply as a ford. Over them lay occupation associated with two ditches. The earlier ditch may have been a natural stream that made a small island in the Erne. The Maguires built their castle on that island and cut a moat around it, a feature shown on early pictures of the site. When the stream was later filled, clay and stone were laid down as a platform to reclaim the softer ground, and a second ditch was cut beyond the eastern edge of that platform. Worked timbers from the later ditch suggest a structure, though not a house. Leather offcuts from shoe-making, mostly of the seventeenth century, lay in the bottom of that ditch with the timbers, together with animal bone and pottery.

The Maguires possessed Fermanagh, Maguire's Country, from about 1250, and they supplied chiefs from about 1264, after they supplanted the Ó Daimhín. Donn Carrach Maguire, who died in 1302, is named as the first chief of the dynasty. Chiefs were inaugurated on the summit of Cuilcagh and sometimes at Lisnasciath, now Lisnaskea. Their rule is given as lasting more than three hundred years, from the end of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth. At first they ruled from Lisnaskea in the south of Fermanagh. One account gives them a private navy of 1,500 boats policing the lough. In the early fifteenth century a man of a junior branch, Hugh the Hospitable Maguire, established a second stronghold at Enniskillen, and the castle became the main seat of the family.

The date of the building is not agreed. The exact year is not recorded. Hugh the Hospitable died in 1428 after returning from a pilgrimage in Spain, and on that account the castle must already have stood, built sometime in the 1420s. He is credited with founding it in those years. Other accounts say that Hugh Maguire built a castle at Enniskillen in 1428, and the stronghold is also described as built in 1428. A further account says the castle was originally built in the sixteenth century. The excavated core is described as a fifteenth-century Maguire tower house. The keep is said to have been built almost six hundred years ago. Fermanagh was made a county by a statute of Elizabeth I, though civil government is placed later, at the Plantation of Ulster.

The earliest written notices are of the 1430s. An annal for 1439 says that the castle of Inis-Ceithlenn was given to Donal Mag Uidhir. The same year is also the earliest notice recognised at the castle itself: King Tomas Óg Maguire was held prisoner in his own castle at Enniskillen by Domnall Maguire the Freckled. Donal and Domnall are the same name, so the gift of the castle and the imprisonment of Tomas Óg may be two tellings of one seizure, and they may be two episodes. A reference in 1438 to the castle of Mag Uidhir is taken to be this castle as well.

The site was attacked long before the Elizabethan war. In 1508 Hugh O'Donnell came with a fleet of boats, took the castle from Rory Maguire, and gave it to Philip Maguire. In the same year Hugh O'Donnell returned and burned the castle to the ground. In 1538 the castle was destroyed again, this time by O'Neill with a party of English soldiers and ordnance.

A later Hugh Maguire is a different man from Hugh the Hospitable. Sir Hugh Maguire, Aodh Mág Uidhir, died on 4 March 1599, or on 4 or 5 March in the reckoning of the days that followed his last fight. He was the first Gaelic chief to rebel openly against the conquest under Elizabeth I, and a founder of the confederacy of the Nine Years' War, dated 1593 to 1603 and also 1594 to 1603. His father Cúconnacht died in June 1589. Hugh was tanist, but Connor Roe Maguire was put forward by a rival branch. Hugh's claim held because Donnell O'Donnell of Tyrconnell backed him, and Hugh was inaugurated in 1589. In 1587, with Arthur O'Neill's men, he attacked Scots who had raided County Down, and on the way back toward the Erne he killed and wounded many of O'Neill's party. He was also drawn into a plot, arranged by the Earl of Tyrone, to murder Tyrone's rival Conn MacShane O'Neill. In 1588 he had helped survivors of the Spanish Armada. He later said that his rebellion was not from any combination with a foreign enemy, nor from malice toward the queen, but from hard usage under Richard Bingham, Lord President of Connaught.

By 1590 Ulster had been divided into counties, and land that had belonged to the Maguire chieftain in Fermanagh was granted back to him on the understanding that he would pay rent to the Crown and obey English law. Elizabeth feared that Philip II of Spain would use Ireland as a base against England, and she set out to conquer the north as well as the rest of the country. The Ulster lords resented that interference. The war that followed lasted nine years. The castle's own account names King Hugh Maguire of Fermanagh as the first to rebel, fighting the English in 1593 near the present town of Ballyshannon, and it says that both sides then understood that whoever held Enniskillen Castle held the key.

The sheriff who provoked him was Humphrey Willis. Willis had already been expelled from Tyrconnell by Hugh Roe O'Donnell in 1592, and he raided cattle through Clan Maguire's country. Maguire was not strong enough to resist until Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, sent reinforcements, and Maguire then expelled Willis. Willis was nevertheless appointed sheriff. Maguire had argued in vain, saying he had already given Lord Deputy FitzWilliam three hundred cows, and asking for the sheriff's eric, the compensation price, so that if Maguire's people cut off the sheriff's head the fine could be levied on the country. In early April 1593 Willis entered Fermanagh with at least one hundred men and pillaged. Maguire said that Willis's men killed a gentleman, the son of Edmund Mac Hugh Maguire, cut off his head, and hurled it from place to place like a football. Dublin did not justify the marauding.

After that first offensive, Maguire, Hugh Roe O'Donnell, Brian Oge O'Rourke, and Theobald, Richard and John Bourke met in Enniskillen Castle on 28 April 1593, which is 8 May in the New Style. Edmund MacGauran, a Catholic archbishop lately returned from Spain, had assembled them. He brought promises that Philip II would help oppressed Irish Catholics if they first showed themselves by fighting. The noblemen signed a letter to Philip II asking for Spanish troops at once. James O'Hely, Catholic archbishop of Tuam, carried their messages to the Spanish court. In May and June 1593 Maguire and Brian Oge O'Rourke raided lands of Richard Bingham and destroyed the town around Ballymote Castle. On 23 June Maguire led 120 horse and 1,000 foot along Lough Allen to raid Tulsk in Roscommon, where Bingham lay encamped. Fog hid the two forces until royal soldiers found the Irish cavalry suddenly close, and they withdrew with many men lost. Bingham countercharged, then fell back when he met Maguire's infantry. Maguire returned to Fermanagh with considerable spoil. MacGauran, riding with him, was killed, and that death was a heavy loss to the new confederacy. The raiding has been read as a proxy war, meant to draw the Crown's eye while Tyrone strengthened himself in Ulster, and Tyrone was still outwardly loyal.

The Crown answered with an army under Sir Henry Bagenal, and with Tyrone himself. Bagenal entered Fermanagh on 22 September 1593 with 144 cavalry, 763 foot and 118 kern, and wasted the northern shore of Lough Erne. Two days later the force reached Enniskillen and found Maguire burning the town around the castle so that Bagenal could not take it over. Maguire held both Enniskillen Castle and Lisgoole Abbey, and the royal force could not cross the Erne. Tyrone joined Bagenal at Enniskillen. On 7 October they marched separately toward the ford near Belleek. On 10 October, at the Battle of Belleek, Maguire had fortified the crossing with gallowglass, redshanks and firearm infantry, about 600 to 900 men. Niall Garbh O'Donnell was there with 60 horsemen, 60 swordsmen and 100 gallowglass, sent by Hugh Roe. Royal musketeers broke the position, and an infantry assault led by Thomas Lee and John Dowdall crossed the ford. About 300 Irish soldiers were killed, and 3 royal soldiers. Maguire was wounded. Tyrone was speared in the leg, which stood as a visible mark of loyalty, though he was later suspected of having advised Maguire and of planning a loss that would make the raids look small. FitzWilliam and Bagenal thought the revolt had been stopped. Maguire's main force, on another account of the same battle, remained unscathed. One reading is that Hugh Roe sent Niall to Belleek in the hope that a rival would die in the slaughter.

Dowdall stayed in Fermanagh with 300 men and raided along Lough Erne. On 20 November his men ambushed Maguire's boats. On 18 January 1594 Maguire nearly walked into English troops he mistook for his own. A shot fired too soon warned him. He escaped, and two companions were killed. Dowdall's men were kept to the north of the lough while Maguire still held Enniskillen.

The first siege of the war followed at once. On 25 January 1594 Captain John Dowdall arrived by boat with three infantry companies. They dug trenches for light cannon and musketeers, but the cannon were too small to do much to the walls. On 30 January Captain George Bingham arrived with 300 men. The assault came from the water. Musketeers in boats and artillery on land fired at the castle, and a large boat with 67 men anchored at a weak point of the wall. They broke a breach with pickaxes and drove the Irish into the keep. Dowdall threatened to ruin the castle with gunpowder if the garrison did not surrender. An Irish witness said there were 36 fighting men and 40 women and children inside. Dowdall said there were 200, and after the surrender he claimed to have killed 150. The defenders were put to the sword. Thomas Lee, who was present, called it a dishonour to the queen, because the defenders had surrendered on terms and the queen's word had been passed to them. Dowdall wrote on 2 February to the lord deputy that he had taken the castle from the rebel Hugh Maguire. A short account says the castle fell on 2 February after a short siege, and that the occupants were massacred after they surrendered. Another account says most, if not all, of Maguire's men were executed, and that Dowdall then reported Maguire had only 7 cavalry and 20 infantry left. A coloured drawing of the siege was made soon afterwards. An English garrison was left in the castle. Measurements taken at the capture were later used to argue that the modern keep is, at least at its base, the same structure as the medieval tower house. The tower house was badly damaged in that capture.

Hugh Roe O'Donnell came to help Maguire take the castle back, which marked O'Donnell to the government as a confederate commander. The dates of the new blockade are given in two ways. One account puts the siege by Hugh Maguire and Cormac MacBaron O'Neill on 17 May 1594, with 1,400 foot and 600 horse, the army growing as Hugh Roe's support arrived. Another says their forces had blockaded the castle by 11 June, and that by late July the royal soldiers were short of food. The English commander was James Eccarsall, with only 50 foot and 24 horse, and some light artillery. He tried a sortie by boat and had to fall back under heavy fire. Irish works cut the river, and the castle was attacked by night. Many of the garrison sickened from hunger and from exhaustion. In the sequence of attacks kept for the castle, 1594 is the year the English under Dowdall were engaged by land and took the castle by water, which matches the February assault, and 1593 and 1594 together are called one of the best documented assaults, captured by Dowdall and soon retaken by Hugh Maguire.

On 7 August a royal column sent to relieve Enniskillen was driven back by Maguire at the Arney River. The fight became known as the Battle of the Ford of the Biscuits. A second relief, under Lord Deputy William Russell, went by another route. It was not attacked, yet none of Russell's scouts or messengers reached the castle or returned. Russell relieved the garrison by 30 August with six months of supplies, and then withdrew. The castle remained cut off, and it is also described as Fermanagh's only government outpost after that relief. A truce followed, marked by subterfuge. A shorter account says only that the castle was under siege again later in 1594 and was relieved.

In January 1595 Maguire raised the clan and the castle was attacked again. Forty picked men in chain mail, armed with Lochaber axes, came at night. They overran the outer defences. The garrison held the tower. The Irish drew off, taking the garrison's three boats, so the English could no longer patrol the Erne. Dublin had too few troops for a relief, and Russell considered withdrawing the garrison. Word reached him that Clan Maguire meant to bring the walls down with gunpowder. In the same January, Maguire and other Irish lords were invited to submit grievances. Elizabeth said she had not known of their poor treatment by officials, and that they would be compensated if the complaints proved true. In April, Maguire and fellow Ulster lords submitted before commissioners in the market place at Dundalk. Peace seemed close. It was a misdirection. Tyrone was waiting on a Spanish expedition.

In May 1595 the English garrison agreed to surrender Enniskillen in exchange for their lives, and the garrison was then massacred. Russell said they had surrendered on terms to Cormac MacBaron O'Neill, who broke his word and had them killed. That treatment did not match the Blackwater Fort, whose garrison was allowed to leave on generous terms in February 1595. The killing at Enniskillen has also been read as revenge for Dowdall's massacre of the Maguire defenders and their families the year before. Hugh Maguire regained the castle in May 1595 with help from Cormac MacBaron. A short account says the fortress finally fell to the Irish in 1595.

The sequence of attacks kept for the castle does not stop at that May. It places a siege by the English under Sir William Russell in September 1595, and a recapture by Maguire in 1596. The same sequence has Russell capturing the castle and Hugh Maguire winning it back the following May. Those sentences do not sit on the same months as the 1594 relief by Russell and the May 1595 massacre of the English garrison. Both sequences are on the record: a relief in August 1594 and an Irish recovery in May 1595, and a further English capture in September 1595 with a Maguire recovery in 1596, or in the May after Russell's capture.

Maguire fought on after Enniskillen. He was at the Battle of Clontibret in 1595, commanded cavalry at Mullaghbrack in 1596, and sent in a submission later that year. When the truce ended in June, Tyrone besieged the Blackwater Fort. On 14 August 1598, at the Battle of the Yellow Ford, Tyrone, O'Donnell and Maguire caught Bagenal's army crossing the River Callan. Ditches had been prepared in the ground. About half of Bagenal's 4,000 men were killed, Bagenal among them. The victory set off a wider revolt, especially in Munster. On 7 September 1598 Maguire was one of six confederate witnesses at a meeting between Tyrone and Lord Deputy Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Warham St Leger, governor of Laois, was also a witness. St Leger would kill Maguire six months later. In 1599 Maguire raided Thomond and took Inchiquin Castle in County Clare. Late in 1599 he went with Tyrone on a pilgrimage to Holycross, part of an effort to win the Old English of the Catholic towns, and he commanded Tyrone's cavalry in the Leinster and Munster campaigns.

On 4 March 1599, near Carrigrohane, about three miles west of Cork, Maguire and a small party were intercepted by Warham St Leger and Henry Power. The two leaders charged. St Leger shot Maguire with a double-bulleted petronel. Maguire lived long enough to drive a lance through St Leger's helmet into his skull, and the steel tip broke off. St Leger was carried to Cork and died on 4 or 5 March. Maguire rode about a mile with his priest and two horsemen, fell from his horse, and died of the gunshot under a bush, in the words of the bishop of Cork. He was buried in an unknown plot near Inniscarra, with military honours. His eldest son was killed in the same skirmish. He had at least three children, Seaan Ruadh, Aodh and Eamonn. His widow Margaret, of the O'Neills, received in October 1612 a legal grant to rent land in County Fermanagh and in County Cavan. The Earl of Clanricarde mentioned a child of Maguire and Margaret in 1607, and Arthur Chichester spoke of their son in 1610. Tyrone broke off the Munster campaign and returned to Ulster.

The lordship of Fermanagh was then contested by Connor Roe Maguire and Cúconnacht Óg Maguire. At a banquet in Tyrone's house at Dungannon, with both claimants present, Hugh Roe O'Donnell proclaimed Cúconnacht Óg as Hugh's successor. Tyrone preferred Connor Roe. The decision was accepted reluctantly, and the strain in the confederacy grew. Connor Roe, called the Queen's Maguire for his support of Elizabeth, was granted the whole of Maguire's Country by letters patent in 1601. The Plantation of Ulster in 1609 set that grant aside and left him 12,000 acres in the barony of Magherastephana. His son Bryan was made Baron Maguire of Enniskillen in 1627.

What happened to the castle at the end of the war is also told in more than one way. One account says it remained in Irish hands from 1595 until it fell in the summer of 1602 to Niall Garve O'Donnell, the Crown's Irish ally. Niall Garbh O'Donnell had fought for the confederacy early in the war, then defected. By 1602 he held Tyrconnell. In March 1602 Mountjoy knighted him. He took Ballyshannon on 25 March. In the same year he destroyed Enniskillen and garrisoned the monasteries of Devenish and Lisgoole. In that sequence, 1602 is the year Cuchonnacht raised the castle so the English could not use it as a base, and the year Niall Garbh O'Donnell and an English force completed the destruction. Cúconnacht Óg left Ireland in the Flight of the Earls in 1607 and died in Genoa in August 1608.

Captain William Cole was given command of Enniskillen Castle in 1607. Another account places that handover in about 1607, when he began to repair the castle, to build the curtain wall with the Watergate, and to put up a wooden house in the English fashion. The defensive ditches, both the moat and the line east of the old stream, were likely recut then. A third account says that in 1609 he became constable, with the job of extending accommodation that then housed only ten warders. By 1611 he had begun a fair house on the foundation of the old castle, and he had completed the turreted building now called the Watergate by 1614. The upper part of the keep is largely his Plantation rebuilding. The castle is also described as his Plantation castle, remodelled after 1614. He is said to have added the riverside tower at the south, the Watergate, in 1609. A further note places the Watergate at about 1615, as a twin-towered addition to the outer wall and not in fact a gate. He purchased the castle outright in 1623.

Cole was born in London about 1571, the only son of Emmanuel Cole of Devon, and he died in October 1653. He was educated at Cambridge, soldiered in the Low Countries in the Anglo-Spanish War, and reached Ireland in 1599 for the Nine Years' War. He was a lieutenant in 1601, fought at the Siege of Kinsale in 1603, and was promoted captain. In 1611 he was granted 1,000 acres at Cornagrade, and in 1612 he bought 1,000 acres at Dromskeagh. He built Portora Castle in 1612. In May 1612 James VI and I granted him land for a new town at Enniskillen, with a church, a public school, a market house, a gaol, and twenty houses for burgesses. The town was incorporated on 7 February 1613, and Cole became its first provost. He was knighted on 5 November 1617, and he is also said to have been knighted in Dublin in 1617. He was high sheriff of Fermanagh in 1608, 1615, 1623 and 1627, and in 1616 a justice of the peace and collector of fines. A commission in 1622 on the progress of the plantation singled him out as a model planter who had drawn many English and Ulster Scots families to the town. In 1622 he helped pay for the first Protestant church in the town, finished in 1627. In 1633 he was briefly imprisoned in Dublin Castle for organising protests in Fermanagh and Monaghan against contributions to the army. He sat for County Fermanagh in the Irish House of Commons in 1634 and 1639, and in 1640 he was part of a delegation sent to London to complain against Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford.

On the confiscation of Hugh Maguire's lands, Fermanagh was divided like the other escheated counties of Ulster. Knockninny and Magheraboy went to Scottish undertakers. Clankelly, Magherastephana and Lurg went to English undertakers. Clanawley, Coole and Tyrkennedy went to servitors and natives. The families who gained most under the new settlement were Cole, Blennerhasset, Butler, Hume and Dunbar.

The keep that Cole repaired still shows the Maguire tower house in the batter at its base. The ground floor was for storing weapons and food. Two vaulted rooms remain, and they are called the oldest rooms in Enniskillen. The large windows are late eighteenth-century work, from a quieter time. The earlier castle would have had much smaller openings. In the late eighteenth century the upper wall of the tower house was taken down and rebuilt in a Georgian manner when the building was refurbished as a barracks. Today the Inniskillings Museum occupies the top two floors, and the ground floor holds the county museum's exhibition on the medieval Maguires.

The castle as it stands has two main medieval and Plantation parts: a central tower keep, and a curtain wall strengthened with small turrets called bartizans. The design is described as strongly Scottish, especially in the Watergate, whose two corbelled circular tourelles are dated about 1609. Another reading treats the corbelling as the Scottish feature, the crenellations as Irish, and the general look as continental. The twin-turreted Watergate is the landmark seen first when the town is approached from the west. A well inside it is lined with stone and is about 13 feet deep. It would normally have been full. It is dry because the water level has been lowered. Excavation asked whether the Watergate had ever been a gate to the waterways, and the answer was no. The name Watergate is relatively recent. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century maps call the building the old castle in ruins.

The Irish Rebellion of 1641 reached Enniskillen in the first days. The plot was set for Saturday 23 October 1641. Connor Maguire and Rory O'Moore were to seize Dublin Castle and its arsenal. Felim O'Neill and his allies were to take the strategic points in Ulster. The Dublin stroke failed because Hugh Og MacMahon told his foster-brother Owen O'Connolly, a Protestant convert, who warned a lord justice. MacMahon and Maguire were arrested. Warnings had also reached Dublin from Sir William Cole. Cole had been forewarned in October when Rory Maguire tried to have him killed at Crevenish Castle. Rory, a captain, had married Deborah Blennerhasset, widow of Leonard Blennerhasset, and by that marriage had become owner of Crevenish, earlier Castle Hassett, on Lower Lough Erne. Before the rising he invited Cole and other Protestant gentry to dinner at Crevenish, meaning to imprison them. Brian Maguire of Tempo had already warned Cole. Before the dinner ended, Cole and the others learned the plan and escaped to raise the alarm.

The Ulster rising went ahead. Felim O'Neill and his allies, Rory Maguire among them, took Dungannon, Charlemont Fort, Newry, Tandragee, Portadown, Mountjoy Castle, Castleblaney and Carrickmacross. Places that did not surrender, Enniskillen Castle among them, were besieged. Within two days the insurgents held most of Armagh, Tyrone, Fermanagh and Monaghan. The castle was besieged by Rory Maguire without success, and it sheltered Protestant settlers. Cole led that defence. Charles I commissioned him, with three other Ulster settlers, in October 1641 to raise regiments for the north-west. Parliament took those forces into pay in July 1642, and they became part of the nucleus of the Laggan Army. Cole retook several castles in Fermanagh by 1643. He resisted the Solemn League and Covenant in January 1644, refused a parliamentary oath in May 1644, and must have taken it soon after. At the end of 1644 he was called to London to answer charges of royalism and of undue leniency toward Catholic rebels. In February 1645 he gave evidence at the trial of Lord Maguire and regained parliament's favour. Connor Maguire, 2nd Baron of Enniskillen, was executed and attainted in 1645. Cole returned to Ireland in May 1645 with £10,000 for the troops in Ulster, and late in 1645 he defeated a rebel force at Irvinestown. Rory Maguire was killed in fighting in 1648. In January 1649, during the Second English Civil War, Cole's largely Scottish settler garrison at Enniskillen mutinied, declared for King Charles, and imprisoned Cole in his own castle. He was released soon after and was in London by June. In December 1649 parliament commissioned him to command 800 men in the Cromwellian conquest, but delays in recruiting meant he never went. He died in October 1653 and was buried at Saint Michan's Church in Dublin. His second marriage, to Catherine Parsons, produced Michael Cole, ancestor of the earls of Enniskillen, and Sir John Cole, 1st Baronet. His first wife, Susan, daughter of John Croft of Lancashire, had two daughters.

The Williamite war turned in Ulster in the last week of July 1689. A Jacobite attack toward Enniskillen was defeated at Newtownbutler on 31 July. More than 1,500 men were killed, and the Jacobite leader Mountcashel was captured. In June 1689 Colonel Zachariah Tiffin had raised local militia at Enniskillen, Zachariah Tiffin's Regiment of Foot, to fight James II. That regiment is the 27th (Inniskilling) Regiment of Foot. It fought at Newtownbutler in July 1689, was placed on the English establishment in 1690, and then fought at the Boyne in July 1690, at Aughrim in July 1691, and at the Siege of Limerick in August 1691. A contingent was at the Siege of Namur in August 1695. The regiment went to the West Indies in late 1739 and returned in December 1740. It fought at Falkirk in January 1746 and at Culloden in April 1746, and in that period it was commonly called Blakeney's Regiment. In 1751 it was formally the 27th (Enniskillen) Regiment of Foot. In 1840 the spelling Enniskillen in the title was changed to Inniskilling. The regiment was nicknamed the Skins. From 1854 and 1868 it served in India, in the suppression of the rising of 1857 and afterwards in the north-west.

Castle Barracks became the home of the 27th Regiment of Foot in 1853. That posting is the subject of a notice in The Edinburgh Gazette of 6 May 1853. The Edinburgh Gazette is an official journal of record of the United Kingdom, published in Edinburgh together with The London Gazette and the Belfast journal of the same kind. Its publication began on 2 March 1699, when James Watson issued it. He printed 41 issues, the last on 17 July 1699, and then gave it up. Captain Donaldson, the editor, later said Watson had found it in his interest to disengage, alluding to Watson's imprisonment that June. The paper passed to John Reid, appeared only now and then, and began a continuous run in 1793. Under the Cardwell reforms the 27th was linked with the 108th (Madras Infantry) Regiment of Foot and assigned to the linked depot at Saint Lucia Barracks in Omagh. The regiment moved from Enniskillen to those purpose-built barracks in 1875. On 1 July 1881 the Childers reforms amalgamated the two regiments as the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. The 27th became the 1st Battalion and the 108th the 2nd. The redesignation was printed in The London Gazette. The London Gazette is the principal official journal of the United Kingdom, first issued as the Oxford Gazette on 7 November 1665, while Charles II and the court were at Oxford to escape the Great Plague. Henry Muddiman published it by authority. Samuel Pepys noted the first of the Oxford Gazettes on 22 November 1665. The first issue under the London title, numbered 24, appeared on 5 February 1666. Among the notices it carries are commissions and promotions of officers. In 1903 the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers were granted a grey hackle for their fusilier hats, in memory of the original grey clothing of the Inniskilling regiment. The same regiment fought in the Second Boer War, the First World War and the Second World War. The regimental chapel is in Saint Macartin's Cathedral in the town. In 1937 its 2nd Battalion was raised again at Omagh and moved to Catterick the following year, while the 1st Battalion went to Wellington in Madras in 1938. After 1945 the 1st Battalion returned from Burma to India and later fought in the Malayan Emergency. In 1948 the two regular battalions were joined as one. The battalion then served in the West Indies from 1949 and came back to the United Kingdom in April 1951. In 1952 the 1st Battalion was presented with the freedom of Enniskillen, the town of its founding. It afterwards served in the Suez Canal Zone and in Kenya during the Mau Mau rising. In 1968 the regiment amalgamated with the Royal Ulster Rifles and the Royal Irish Fusiliers, Princess Victoria's, into the Royal Irish Rangers.

The cavalry regiment remembered beside them was formed later. In 1922, at Cairo, the 5th Dragoon Guards, Princess Charlotte of Wales's, and the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons amalgamated as the 5th/6th Dragoons, later the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards. That regiment served in the Second World War and in the Korean War. In August 1992 it amalgamated with the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards to form the Royal Dragoon Guards. Its museum, with that of the fusiliers, is the Inniskillings Museum in the castle. A further display is at Chester Castle.

The barracks themselves began in 1796, when the castle was refurbished as Castle Barracks at a cost of £7,000, as part of the answer to a threat of a French invasion. The complex then grew through the nineteenth century, and many of those buildings survive. The curved range, also called the arcaded range, is a two-storey block on the line of the old outer wall of the Maguire castle and of Cole's bawn wall. It was built for the soldiers, horses and gun carriages of the resident cavalry. By 1822 the ground floor held stables and gun sheds for the artillery, and the upper floor a barracks and a hospital. Some of the perimeter wall may have been built into the range. Use of the upper floors as a hospital was short, because men sick from long campaigns needed cleaner conditions. By the later nineteenth century the building held stores, sleeping quarters, two cooks' houses, and a house written on the plan as an ablusion house. By 1879 the ground floor was no longer used for gun sheds. In the 1950s the occupants were the county council, using it for stores, the Territorial Auxiliary Association, and the river police of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The range now holds part of the Inniskillings Museum, including a shop and a reception.

The barrack coach house stood outside the barracks as they are now seen, until 1827. Early nineteenth-century maps show that corner as open ground. In 1879 there was a ball court there. In 1881 the space became a coach house, altered in 1905 and then called the motor house. In 1922 the upper floor was still a barracks. One account says the castle was decommissioned as a military barracks in 1927. Another says the barracks were still in use by other regiments, became the home of the North Irish Horse from November 1939, were decommissioned in 1950, and were then converted for use as a council depot. The coach house was later used by the social services and then stood empty for several decades. It is now the first stop of the museum galleries, with the Lakeland Galleries, the Full Circle Art Gallery, and the Island Town Gallery.

The strip of ground by the water, now the castle garden, was not inside the original walls. A perimeter wall enclosed it when the site became a barracks in the late eighteenth century. By 1842 a privy block stood at the base of the Watergate, and the Watergate was the main latrine of the barracks. The commander's garden dates from some time between 1857 and 1879. An 1879 plan shows it between the perimeter wall and the magazine store, with a central path. From about 1893 until the 1950s the ground was a firing range of 30 yards. Making the range meant shaping banks and slopes so that firing would be safe. The garden now sits beside the Watergate, looking over the Erne, and it is used for weddings and outdoor events.

The North Irish Horse was a yeomanry unit raised in the northern counties after the South African war. King Edward VII approved the North of Ireland Imperial Yeomanry in 1901, and the formation was sanctioned and gazetted on 7 January 1902. Recruiting began in 1903. Four squadrons were raised, and C Squadron was in Enniskillen. The regiment fought in the First World War, mounted and then as cyclists, and was reduced to a single man between the wars. On 31 August 1939 the War Office ordered it reconstituted as a wheeled armoured-car unit under Sir Basil Brooke, formerly of the 10th Hussars, with Lord Erne as second in command. Brooke soon left because political work came first. After several temporary officers, Lieutenant Colonel David Dawnay took command. On 11 September 1939 a special army order moved the regiment from the cavalry of the line to the Royal Armoured Corps. By November, 50 recruits had been trained and 30 or 40 more were about to start, and in that same month the regiment moved its base to Enniskillen Castle. Headquarters Squadron, Captain Newton commanding and the Marquess of Ely his second, was based at Castle Barracks. By January 1940 the regiment had vintage Rolls-Royce armoured cars fitted with Vickers machine guns. Training stopped on 24 May 1940 when a bomb of the Irish Republican Army exploded close to the officers' mess, which was on the Main Street in Enniskillen, not inside the castle. The regiment then moved to Portrush. Its hardest fighting in that war was in North Africa and Italy. It was reformed in 1947 as part of the Territorial Army yeomanry in Northern Ireland, became an armoured reconnaissance regiment in 1956, and avoided disbandment again in 1961. The name continues in a squadron of the Scottish and North Irish Yeomanry and in a signal squadron.

The castle is a State Care historic monument, open to the public in opening hours, and charges apply. A new visitor centre opened in 2016. The buildings let a visitor follow a medieval stronghold, a Plantation castle, a garrison fort and a military barracks. Fermanagh County Museum, in the castle, treats the county's history, culture and natural history: prehistory, natural history, rural life, local crafts, Belleek Pottery, the history of the castle, and the Maguire family. Belleek Pottery is a porcelain works at Belleek, in County Fermanagh, which began trading in 1884 as the Belleek Pottery Works Company Ltd. Its Parian ware is thin and slightly iridescent, with a body rich in frit. Pottery in that district began around 1849, after John Caldwell Bloomfield inherited his father's estate at Castle Caldwell on Lower Lough Erne. He wanted work for tenants hit by the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852, and he had already failed with lace and with cement. A geological survey in 1852 found feldspar and kaolin. Robert William Armstrong, a London architect, and David McBirney, a Dublin merchant, became his partners. Preparation of the factory began in 1858. The building stood by 1860 and was still described as unfinished in 1861. Production probably began in 1863, and small amounts of Parian ware were made successfully in that year. By 1865 customers included the Prince of Wales and Queen Victoria. In 1853 Bloomfield sent feldspar for analysis at the Royal Porcelain Works in Worcester, arranged through Armstrong, and in 1854 Armstrong and W. H. Kerr visited Castle Caldwell. The Enniskillen and Bundoran Railway, built in 1866, brought coal to the kilns and carried the wares toward the ports. From 1952 the works began to replace coal-fired kilns with electric kilns. The original owners were dead by 1884, when local investors took the works and gave it the company name.

Archaeology inside the keep is known from a small evaluation in 2006, before non-slip tiles were laid in the atrium. Cormac McSparron opened an area 3.2 metres east to west by 2.2 metres. Under the flagstones was rubble and mortar 60 millimetres thick, partly set with concrete to carry the floor. Below that, a grey, mortar-rich sandy loam up to 40 millimetres deep covered most of the trench. Under it were further mortar-rich sands and clays, left unexcavated, so their order was uncertain. They seemed to lie over a dressed stone wall and a vaguer stone spread that may have been a rough cobbled surface. The wall ran at least 1.65 metres from north-east to south-west and was up to about 0.65 metres thick. A box 1.4 metres by 0.5 metres on its east side showed that the wall sat in a foundation cut, dug into a dark grey-brown clay with flecks of charcoal. It was not possible to say whether that clay was natural. The charcoal may mark earlier human use, or it may be natural. The disturbed upper layer held animal bone and pottery of the mid twentieth century. The mortar-flecked layer under it held bone, small pieces of clay-pipe stem, and creamware of the later eighteenth or early nineteenth century. No objects came from the other layers. The evaluation showed that archaeological layers survive under the modern floor of the atrium, and it suggested that similar fabric may survive under other floors in the keep.

After those ditch fills, enough time passed for a thin soil to form before the ground was levelled again for a barrack yard, probably in the early 1800s. Rubble and gravel for the modern car park then sealed the sequence.

A recent exhibition at the county museum in the castle shows finds from Drumclay crannog, a lakeside settlement near Enniskillen, not from the castle fabric. The crannog was established in the early ninth century, used and reused over several centuries, with activity continuing into the seventeenth century. Major excavation in 2012 and 2013 recovered wood, leather and other organic objects preserved by waterlogging. The exhibition, opened in July 2026 and running until 10 October 2026, includes a rare wooden cheese press, one of the largest early medieval gaming boards found in Ireland, and personal objects such as jewellery, shoes and combs, with pieces linked to music and to craft. The castle's own history, on this evidence, runs from a ford and a Maguire tower house, through the sieges of the 1590s and Cole's Watergate, to a barracks and two museums.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/enniskillen-castle