In a quiet field above the County Fermanagh town of Lisnaskea stands an ancient mound, almost
certainly a Neolithic burial tomb, known locally as the Moat Ring, or Sciath Gabhra in Irish.
Sometimes it named as the Hill of Cornashee. This is the spot where fifteen men were crowned
as Kings of Fermanagh between 1264 and 1589. All fifteen belonged to the Maguire family, once
among the most prominent dynasties in the north-west of Ireland.
By the standards of most Irish kings, and indeed of many European kings, the Maguires boasted a
remarkably serene track record. Their reigns averaged over two decades each, with many
notching up over forty years, while challenges to the throne were rare and only one of the
fifteen was assassinated.
Occasionally they were obliged to arm and defend themselves against the O’Neill’s, O’Donnell’s
or the other clans that threw a punch every now and then – the O’Rourkes, the O’Reillys, the
McGoverns, the McKiernans, the O’Hanlon’s, the MacMahon’s …
Sometimes, it was the Maguires ambition to dispossess such rivals. The barony of Clanawley, for
instance, is named for Amhlamh [pronounced Ow-lee] Maguire, a younger son of one of the
kings, who headed to the west side of the lake to seize the area from its previous occupants.
Likewise, Clankelly is named for Donnchadh Ceallach Maguire who wrestled control of that
townland from the MacMahons.
And, of course, there were some internal squabbles but, in general, County Fermanagh and the
Lough Erne region under the Maguires was a stable and prosperous place for nearly three
centuries, with the throne passing from father to son, father to son, and mostly to the eldest
son.
Patrons of the Art
The Maguires were exceptionally progressive, their households replete with historians, poets and
learned men who received their patronage. There were three hereditary families of poets – Ó
Fialáin [pronounced O’Feel-loin, aka Phelan], Ó hEodhusa [pronounced O-hoe-iss-sah, as
in Hussey] and MacRibheartaigh [pronounced Mac-Rear-tee].
There were two families of historians, the Ó Cianáin [pronounced O-key-noyne, as in Keenan]
and the Ó Luinin [pronounced O Lynn-een, generally taken as Lineen or Lennon], while their
hereditary lawyers were the Ó Breslen and their hereditary physicians were the Ó Cassidys of
Coole on the eastern shore of the Upper Lough.
They were also tremendous benefactors of the Christian church, introducing new orders,
endowing churches and embarking on pilgrimages to Rome and Santiago de Compostella in
Spain. In their twilight, several Maguire princes abdicated in good time to prepare for their death.
Donn Mor & Don Carrach
The family descend from Donn Mor Maguire, a warrior who witnessed attempts by the Anglo Norman authorities in Dublin to build castles at Clones, County Monaghan, and Belleek and Cael
Uisce, County Fermanagh, during the reign of King John. Cáel Uisce is thought to have been located either at Castle Caldwell or at the very spot where the River Erne leaves Lower Lough
Erne. Donn Mor lived to see all three castles destroyed by the indigenous Irish.
In 1258, Cáel Uisce was the setting for ‘a general meeting of the provincial kings of Ireland.’
There had been a plan to elect one supreme king of Ireland at the meeting but the O’Briens and
the O’Neills were both in attendance and neither was prepared to accept the other family as
supreme so the event broke up without a resolution. i
Four years later, Donn Mor’s son Donn
Carrach Maguire was the first of the line to be crowned king of Fermanagh. Hailed by the bards
as ‘Ireland’s Most Generous Lord’, he lived at Lisnaskea and reigned for forty-two-years until
1301 when, as the Annals of Ulster recorded, he ‘rested in Christ’.
Donn’s descendants continued to expand the Maguires territory, albeit as a subservient family
to O’Donnell of Tir Conaill [Tyrconnell] who was, for the most part, subservient to O’Neill of
Tyrone. In fact, the Norman influence also prevailed into the 15th century as the entire area was
held by Richard de Burgh, the Red Earl of Ulster, the father-in-law of Robert the Bruce. In 1342,
it was recorded that de Burgh’s grandson received tribute of eighty cows from Ruadhri
Maguire, King of Fermanagh, a man described in the Annals of Clonmacnoise as ‘one that bestoed
most of gould, Silver, cattle & other guifts upon poets & bards & others of theire kind in Ireland’.
Philip of the Battle Axe
Among the most influential Maguires was Philip of the Battle Axe who reigned from 1363 to
1395. He earned his moniker by fending off attacks by rival MacMahon, O’Neill and O’Connor
chieftains in a series of gruesome battles. Fermanagh essentially took on the county’s present
shape and size on his watch when he established it as a buffer kingdom between the warring
realms of Ulster and Connaught. His greatest asset was a fleet of white sail boats on Lough Erne
that gave him mastery of the waters. At one point, his fleet sailed into Lough Oughter in County
Cavan and captured the O’Reilly chief who subsequently became his foremost ally.
Hugh the Hospitable
Hugh the Hospitable, Philip’s son, built the original castles at Enniskillen and Monea and was
widely applauded for his virtue and munificence. Once a year, he would seat himself beneath a
whitethorn tree at Monea at sunrise, from where he would receive his extended family and
neighbours, listening to their woes, dispensing wise counsel and handing out dowries to girls
whose fathers were in financial difficulty. A frequent pilgrim to Rome, Spain and Italy, he was
returning from the Holy Land when he died in Kinsale, County Cork, in 1428.
The castle at Enniskillen was strategically a rock solid spot to build a fort because it was on an
island between Upper and Lower Lough Erne, enabling the Maguires to control the passage
of all ships to-ing and fro-ing between the lakes, and to keep an eye on the way goods were
being distributed to the surrounding areas. A poetic description of the castle at Enniskillen
appeared in the Book of O’Conor Don in 1480:
‘When one comes to its threshold one, sees a herb-garden and ships, and there is only a fence
between them. A strip of lake by the side of the house, a green clearing in front of it: the
reflection of its purple outlines – a borrowed beauty – in the lake.’ ii
Enniskillen Castle
Thomas Óg & the Spirit Sail
Hugh’s successor, Thomas Óg Maguire, aka Thomas the Younger, was considerably less pious.
He once decorated his garden with the heads of sixteen O’Rouke nobles whom his men had
slain during a raid on their strongholds at Bawnboy and Ballyconnell. A 15th century poem to
Tomas Óg records ‘a forest of masts is on the Éirne – it makes one start with joy to see them.’
Indeed. The annals also record how Tomas Óg collected tribute from the districts north of
Lough Erne and, then, “he embarked in one of the vessels of his fleet, and sailed up to Galloon
[on Upper Lough Erne], where he kept a house of general hospitality for a month while
collecting the tributes of the southern districts.’
Thomas Óg’s descendants were the senior or ‘Lisnaskea’ branch of the Maguires while those of
his brother Philip became the junior or ‘Enniskillen’ branch. These two branches evolved into
increasingly bitter rivals as the crown passed from one to the other over the ensuing century.
By 1500, the family owned almost all of the present county of Fermanagh and manned all the
principal positions; the bishops, archdeacons, priors and parish priests were all Maguires, while
most other families kowtowed to them. The Maguires loyalty swung between the O’Neill and
O’Donnell families as those two warring dynasties vied for supreme power in north-west
Ireland. I am unsure who murdered Cúchonnacht Maguire, the 11th Prince of the family, in
1537. The only Maguire prince to be assassinated, he met his maker on the island of Craghan in
Lough Erne. He was initially buried on Devenish Island but his remains were later removed
to Donegal Abbey.
At St Molaise’s Church on Devenish Island, of which the Maguires were patrons, you’ll find what
looks like the prow of a sailing ship incorporated into their crest. On a lichen-encrusted Maguire
gravestone on the island, you can also still just about make out the shape of a ship with sloped
masts, a sprit sail rig perhaps, as in a four-sided, fore-and-aft sail. Certainly the spirit sail would
have been a common sight on Lough Erne in the medieval period, right through until the
invention of the outboard motor.
Devenish Island
Tudor Advance
In the 1580s, the Connaught poet Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn [aka Blind Tadhg O’Higgins] penned a
40-line poem called ‘Enniskillen’, which opened with the line ‘Enniskillen, with its glistening bays
and melodious falls…’ He goes on to describe: ‘The strand beside the court, on the fairy-like
bay of murmuring streams, was crowded with such groves of tapering ship-masts that they
concealed the beach and its waves.’ iii He makes it sound like a 21st century yacht club! He also
remarks on ‘a company of artificers binding vessels’, which sounds like a team of boat builders at
work – planking up new boats and making the vital tools, the oars, the spars, the sails and so on.
I have read that the Maguire chieftains’ had 1,500 boats patrolling their lakes and waterways at
their peak, which certainly sounds like an exaggeration but perhaps not.
However, even while the ink was drying on Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn poem, Ireland was being
shaken to its core by the unstoppable power of the Tudor army of Queen Elizabeth. The
queen’s army had already seized most of Munster and, in 1585, they effectively took control of
Connaught. Almost all of Ireland was now under Crown control, bar certain pockets of Ulster.
Elizabeth’s reign coincided with that of Cúchonnacht II, one of the most scholarly Maguire chiefs.
He acceded to a request to surrender his lands to the queen in 1585; he received them back
without its church lands. When the Tudor administration in Dublin formally shired
Fermanagh the following year, Cúchonnacht must have known the end was nigh.
It fell to Cúchonnacht II’s son and heir Hugh (Aodh) to defend his ancestral kingdom. In 1589,
this fearless young man stepped down from the coronation stone at Lisnaskea as the 15th
Maguire chief of Fermanagh. He realised that his late father’s conciliatory attitude to the Tudors
was a ticket to nowhere. Loyalty to the Crown clearly counted for little; the teenaged Red Hugh
O’Donnell, whose father had been a loyal supporter of the Crown, was banged up in Dublin
Castle for four years. Hugh Rua McMahon’s friendship with the Tudors had ended when they
hanged him outside his own front door.
Initially Hugh Maguire played the game, accepting a knighthood in Christ Church Cathedral in
1591. The following year he helped Red Hugh, his cousin, to break out of Dublin Castle. Both
men now realised that the Tudors posed an existential threat to their world. They gradually
persuaded the region’s most powerful noble, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, raised in Queen
Elizabeth’s court, that he must come on board.
As the Nine Years War began, so Ulster became a battleground between the warring armies of
Protestant England and Catholic Ireland. Initially Maguire and his allies managed to push the
English out of Fermanagh but reinforcements returned, captured both Enniskillen and Lisnaskea and installed a string of garrisons from Newry all the way to Ballyshannon, including Monaghan,
Benburb and Lisnaskea.
The Irish enjoyed some exceptional successes, not least when O’Neill’s great victory at the battle
of the Yellow Ford gave him complete power in Ulster in 1598. However, when their armies
moved south, the campaign began to flounder. In 1600, Hugh Maguire led his men as far south
as Cork where he rashly decided to raid an English camp; he completely underestimated his
opponents who overwhelmed them, killing 32 Maguires, including Hugh, his son, his foster-father
and his chaplain. Legend holds that Hugh’s horse refused to eat after his death and withered
away. Hugh was buried alongside his ancestor and namesake, Hugh the Hospitable, founder of
Enniskillen, who had been buried in Cork 172 years earlier. Writing in the 1830s, John
O’Donovan claimed that Hugh’s direct descendants were to be found working as sailors in
cross-channel coal ships at that time.
The loss of Hugh Maguire was an enormous blow to the Gaelic alliance, not least when a power
struggle among his heirs saw one claimant form a treacherous pact with the Tudors that paved
the way for English conquest of the region. This came just as O’Neill and O’Donnell saw their
dreams shattered by an absolute English victory over their combined forces at Kinsale.
Cúchonnacht Óg & the Flight of the Earls
Hugh Maguire’s brother Cúchonnacht Óg (Constantine) is considered the last Maguire king of
Fermanagh, although he was never crowned. He returned from the defeat at Kinsale to find his
lands devastated by the English conquerors. By 1605, over half of his estate had been seized and
parcelled out to planters. Maybe he considered a fight but one might bear in mind the words
of Sir John Davies, the Attorney-General of Ireland, who toured the area in 1607 and observed,
‘Generally the natives of this country are reputed the worst swordsmen in the north, being
rather inclined to be scholars or husbandmen, than to be kern, or men of action’.
As mentioned, there was indeed an unusually large number of hereditary learned families in
Fermanagh – bards, historians, harpers and master craftsmen. In any event, come 1606,
Cúchonnacht Óg was in France where he purchased a Breton vessel in Rouen, dolled it up as an
innocuous fishing boat and sailed it back from Dunkirk to Lough Swilly in County Donegal. On
14 September 1607, approximately one hundred passengers boarded Cúchonnacht Og’s ship at
Rathmullan. The ship duly sailed for France with the cream of Ireland’s Gaelic nobility in what
became known as the Flight of the Earls.
Having reached Quillebeuf in Normandy, most passengers went overland to Rome to meet the
pope. Cúchonnacht Og was among those who reached Rome but, always restless, he was
determined to convince the Spanish king to send a new Armada to Ireland. In the summer of
1608, he joined forced with James MacMahon and boarded a ship at Naples that was bound for
Spain. While staying a night at Ostia, both men became violently ill with fever and died. They
were buried in a Franciscan monastery near Genoa.
Postscript
The remaining Maguire lands in Ireland were subsequently vested in his kinsmen Bryan, who was
created Baron Maguire of Enniskillen in 1627. Bryan sponsored the celebrated Annals of the Four
Masters but his sons were also fated for a sticky end. His son Connor, the 2nd Baron, was
hanged, drawn, and quartered in London for high treason after the Irish Rebellion in 1641, while
his brother, Colonel Rory Maguire, was killed in a skirmish in 1648. It was Rory who destroyed
Tully Castle, by Derrygonnelly, the ruins of which still stand on the southern shores of Lower
Lough Erne.
Tully Castle
Over the next century, the titular Barons Maguire of Enniskillen served in the Jacobite and
French armies, with the last one serving as a captain in the Comte de Lally‘s Regiment of Irish
Infantry. iv Thus runs the rise and fall of a remarkable dynasty who ruled the Erne for several
hundred years.
_____________________________________________
i Tadhg Cael Uisce Ó Briain (born c. 1230, died 1259) was the eldest son of Conchobhar na Siudane Ó
Briain and Tánaiste of Thomond. He received the suffix “Cael Uisce” from the having attended the
conference of Cael Uisce on behalf of his father and refusing to acknowledge Brian Ua Néill as High King.
He died in 1259, pre-deceasing his father.
See The History and Topography of the County of Clare by James Frost, 1258 here. ‘A general meeting of
the provincial kings of Ireland was therefore convoked, at a place called Cael-uisce, on Lough Erne, near
the present Castle Calwell [sic], and Conor O’Brien, being unable to attend in person, sent his eldest son
Teige, called in after times, from that incident, Teige Cael-uisce, to represent him in the assembly (A.D.
1258). As the best means of resisting the English, it was proposed, that one supreme king of Ireland should
be acknowledged, with full powers vested in him, to call out and command the forces of the whole
country. This was agreed to, but when it came to the selection of the supreme ruler, a contest arose
between O’Neill and O’Brien as to which of the two should be the man to be chosen. O’Neill’s right was
regarded as paramount and unquestionable, but O’Brien would not yield, and as a consequence, the
conference broke up without arriving at any definite settlement of the question. Since Ireland was first
inhabited up to the present day, no act more fatal to her true interests ever happened than this. The
opportunity was lost, never to return, of annihilating the power of England, then in its weakness. The
example of Brian Boroimhe, who by means of his sole sovereignty over the whole island was able to
extirpate the Danes, was forgotten by his descendant Teige Cael-uisce, and by his act of vain folly, the
island has since remained a scene of anarchy, fomented by the machinations of the unscrupulous stranger.
Teige died in the following year, but it had been better for his country that he was never born.’
ii Beith ré dán dlighidh ollamh, petition to Tomás Óg Mág Uidhir († 1480) by Cú Chonnacht Ó Fialáin
[The Book of O’Conor Don, 246b]
iii The full poem is here. Poor Ó hUigin was fated to be murdered in 1591 by members of the Ó
hEadhra [O’Hara] family along with his wife and child after he mocked them in a poem. They cut his
tongue out before they killed him.
iv A branch of the Maguire family lived and farmed on Inisliroo, known locally as Rabbit Island, a short
crossing by boat from Knockninny Quay near Derrylin.
Further Reading
Clark, Michael, The Sailing History
of Lough Erne, Clogher Record, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2005), pp. 501-540
Livingstone, Father Peadar, ‘A
Fermanagh Story’ (Cumann Seanchais Chlochair, 1969)
Martyn, Adrian (2016). ‘The Tribes of Galway, 1124-1642’
Simms, Katharine. “The Medieval
Kingdom of Lough Erne.” Clogher Record,
vol. 9, no. 2, 1977, pp. 126-141.
