FERMANAGN
A diet of stones and fishes

Mossy headstones in the graveyard on the island of Galloon in the western part of the county of Fermanagh strike notes which resonate across time. One many, a skilled mason of the 18th century has carved, with great crafts, those symbols of death which said so much to the people of his time, Here, among the coarse,wet and fesh cut grass, are cold icons of man's mortality: crossed bones, sands-timers hour-glass, bell, coffin and skull.

Yet, it is not the bell tolling the inexorable passing of the hours recorded by the falling grains of sand - nor the sombre closed-for-ever coffin lids, nor the piratical crossed bones, but rather it is the carved skulls which envoke time before the dawn of Ireland's written history. For they echo the carving of cult from the core of Celtic mystricism which can trace its lineage down the centuries in the enigmatic stone heads found scattered across the multitude of islands in this quiet county of reedy lakes, and of fish, and of time standing still.

Major-General, the Honourable Sir Galbriath Lowry Cole, scion of the Cole family who came to the county of Fermanagh in the 1600s, also looks down in stone effigy, cavalry sabre in hand, over the four hills of Enniskillen, the island county town. Were the sabre telescope, he could scan the 50 watery miles(80km) of the two Loughs Erne which dominate Fermanagh, fed by the River Erne which winds its way north and west from its bubbling county Cavan source to where it enters the sea among Donegals' surf beaches.

At the general's stone feet, as it were, is Enniskillen. Its one long main street curls east to west, traversing four hills, two bridges and changing its name a handful of times as it does. The hills offer an ensapsulation of its strengths. One the farthest, Portora royal School traces its origins back to 1608 and the plantations - the playwrghts Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett, are among its alumni. On the next are the Anglication cathedrals of St MacCarin's, Catholics St Michael's and the Wesleyan Chapel. The next is the Townhall's hill. The fourth hill, Fort Hill, is the general's.

At its foot, by the East bridge stands the Cenotaph, where, at 11:00am each Remembrance Sunday in early November, old men with burnished medals, Boy Scouts with shining shoes and nurses in uniform, father in silence to remember friend, fathers, grandefathers and great-grandfathers who gave their lives during the two world wars. At the 1987 Remembrance Day service the IRA detonated a bomb among those so gathered, killing 11 and shattering the bodies of many more.

No other killing so moved Ireland. War-hardened reporters, who had seen it all, cound not fight back tears, President Reagan and Charles Haughey, the Republic of Ireland's Taoiseach(Prime Minister), spoke of the their revultion, the Pope of his shock. On stage, in concert in America, Bono of U2, cursed Irish-Americans who funded the terrorists.

There is a new Cenotaph now, and dotted along the rows of solid Georgian merchants' houses which flank this main street, are the Convent School, the Orangemen's Hall, the Court House, the Presbyterian Church, the two local newspaper offices, a scattering of bistros, gift shops and a dozen atmospheric pubs made cosmopolitan with the accents of Dutch, French, German and Swiss who have cruised and fished the great lakes as holiday makers, undeterred, even through the worst of the 'Troubles', letting the county know it's future is tourism.

'Cole's Pole', as the Enniskillen people term the pillar on which the general's staue stands, is fluted and Doric. Over the centuries the Coles, who became the Earls of Enniskillen, came, both directly, and by intermarriage with Planter an Gaelic families, to control every rolling arable acre, every lakeside castle- Archdale, Caldwell, Coole, Crevenish, and even policed the lakes through the 17th and 18th centuries. The members of the British Parliament in the period 1661-1885.

Socially they were as other Anglo-Irish families. They employed professionals to sail their yachts, engaged governesses to teach their daughters French, had their sons tutored to serve as high sheriffs at home, and as generals abroad. They vied with their neighbour as to who could build to finest house and sculpt nature to its most ordered. Thus Fermanagh's inheritance from the Coles includes: Castle Coole, Ireland's finest Palladian mansion; Florence Court, a more modest Georgian concoction; battle honours for Enniskillen's Catherdral and misty photographs of aged yachts, so beloved of coffee-table book editors.

There, an interest in the family might have ceased had they no dabbled in scientific pursuits natural to the area. The name of Lady Dorothy Galbraith Cole is still associated with her work in recording the county's cult. For the Celts of the 3rd century AD, the carved human head was the house of the spirit, and just as the cross is the icon of the Chritian, so decapitation, not crucifixion, figures in Celtic myth.

Carved heads are found on the ruined churches and crosses scattered liberally by the lakes, none more fascinating than the six half-pagan, half Christian images cemented into the tiny 12th-century, ruins church on White Island. The first figure on the left is a squatting female - grotesque cheeks bulging; mouth grinning; legs wide apart. She is aroused, bestriding the bridge from pagan exultation and Christian disapproval. Such figures are termed Sheela na Gigs and their presence in holy Ireland has given many god-fearing archaeologist hours of soul-searching.

The Coles' other scientific diversion was fish. Quite rightly so, for the Erne and its catchment has much to reveal. There are big trout to troll for on the Lower Lough Erne and plenty of smaller ones to take the mayfly. Salmon, almost destroyed by the hydro-electric barrier at Ballyshannon, are effecting a return.

There is also the delightful charr - olive black, pink-spotted - as distant relative of the salmon, left behind in a scattering of Irish loughs when the ice age retreated. The many sub-species of charr swimming in Ireland's isolated lakes are mostly named after those who first recored them for scientific journals. in Lough Eske is found Cole's charr, named for the 3rd Earl of Enniskillen, whos donation of the first specimen in the 1860s was but one of his many contributions for which the British Museum is no doubt enternally grateful.