The most apt of names

Belle Isle, Co Fermanagh, Northern Ireland The home of Lord and Lady Nicholas Hamilton. An 18th-century beauty spot that briefly fell into complete neglect has been restored. John Goodall tells the remarkable story of this island estate, its eccentric owners and its modern revival

- John Goodall

BELLE ISLE is a house that perfectly answers its name. It stands in a wonderful situation on the shore of an island at the northern end of Upper Lough Erne. With a busy outline of gables and dominated by a narrow tower, it has a romantic, castle-like air today (Fig 2). Surviving in the heart of this building, however, is a small and relatively modest Georgian house, which was constructed in about 1717 as the centrepiece to an ambitious planned landscape that enjoyed a spell of 18th-century celebrity. The rich and intriguing history of the place was explored by Dr A. P. W. Malcomson, in his account of Belle Isle in the Clogher Record (1998).

On September 4, 1607, the Gaelic Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell set sail from Rathmullan, Co Donegal, in search of Spanish support in their long-running conflict with the English Crown. The so-called Flight of the Earls proved to be a disastrous political miscalculation. James I swiftly declared the estates of the refugee earls forfeit and intensified the process of colonising Ulster with a new Protestant population drawn from England and Scotland.

One of the many beneficiaries of this undertaking was Paul Gore, an Elizabethan soldier of fortune, who was eventually elevated to the dignity of a baronetcy in 1621. He established his seat at Manor Gore in Co Donegal at the heart of the 29,000-acre estate granted to him in 1611. He also received a 1,000-acre property in Co Fermanagh that included the island Ballymacmanus on Lough Erne, the future Belle Isle.