Mitchell Smyth

Meridian Writers’ Group

TULLY BAY, Ireland — In the 19th century it was a failure. In the 21st, it’s one of the success stories of Irish tourism.

Nobody was thinking of holidayers in 1846 when a group of entrepreneurs began building a canal connecting the waters of Ulster’s Lakeland with the Shannon River, thus creating a waterway from the northwest of Ireland to the port of Limerick and the Atlantic Ocean. Trade was their motive.

The trade never materialized and the canal was abandoned. But 150 years later that defeat has been turned into a triumph. Restored, and rebuilt in places, the Shannon-Erne Waterway is one of the gems of Irish tourism, attracting thousands of pleasure boaters from all over Britain and Europe.

It took 14 years of backbreaking work—there wasn’t much mechanization in rural Ireland in those days—to dig the channels and build the locks connecting the Woodford River and Lough Erne (in present-day Northern Ireland) to the town of Leitrim on the River Shannon, in the Republic of Ireland.

It opened in 1860. In the nine years that it operated it was used by exactly eight boats. Not surprisingly, it was then abandoned. Lock gates rotted, bridges crumbled, silt and vegetation clogged the channels and whole sections dried up as the “waterway” reverted to nature. Then, in the 1990s, a $60-million scheme (a joint Irish-British project) brought it back to life.

Ironically, the absence of cities and industries in the area, which originally made the waterway a failure, is today just what attracts tourists—in something like 4,000 boats that travel through the 16 locks every year. Dredged and banked and filled with water again, the 65-kilometre [40-mile] Shannon-Erne Waterway, weaving together streams, rivers, small lakes and man-made channels, offers cruisers, bargers and canoeists a trip through some of the most beautiful country in Europe.

Charlie Greene, manager of a craft rental agency here in Tully Bay, at the northern end of the waterway, tells the story while showing a visitor over some of the boats that ply the lakes and canal, boats that accommodate anything from two to 10 persons.

“You don’t have to be an expert,” he says. “We teach you all you need to know. There’s a video and we take you out on the water for practice. Then you’re off on your own.”

He and other operators get lots of repeat business. “If we get them on a boat there’s a good chance we’ll get them back,” he says.

Greene explains the electronically coded “smart’’ cards that operate the hydraulic locks. It takes, on average, about 15 minutes to clear a lock, but on a trip like this you’re not in a hurry. As Greene, with typical Irish blarney, points out: “When God made time, He made an awful lot of it.”

Plenty of time for sightseeing, too. Public moorings with showers, toilets, laundries and pump-out facilities are available throughout the system. And, this being Ireland, there’s no shortage of entertainment in the “singing pubs” in the towns along the way.

Explore More:

For more information visit the Waterways Ireland website at www.waterwaysireland.org. Click on “1. Shannon-Erne Waterway.”

For information on travel in Ireland visit the Tourism Ireland website at www.discoverireland.com.