Brookeborough – Colebrooke's sporting estate

On New Year’s Day 1957, a fourteen-man IRA unit drove into Brookeborough to storm the village’s RUC barracks. The raid failed, but two of the men died of their wounds – Seán South, 28, from Limerick, and Fergal O’Hanlon, 20, from Monaghan – and that is how a Fermanagh village of 438 people earned a lasting place in republican song. The raid lived on in ballads, Dominic Behan’s ‘The Patriot Game’ among them, and more than half a century later it is still the first thing many people in Ireland associate with the name.

The name itself belongs to the other half of the story. Brookeborough (Irish Achadh Lon, ‘field of the blackbirds’) grew up around the estate of the Brooke family, who were granted confiscated land here after the 1641 rebellion. The 1st Viscount Brookeborough served twenty years as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, and the village and the title both carry the family name. The family seat, Colebrooke Park, still stands just outside the village, and the present Viscount and Viscountess Brookeborough live there.

Colebrooke Park and the sporting estate

Colebrooke is the reason most visitors come, but go in with the right expectations: this is a private, working estate of 1,000 acres, not a ticketed attraction. You can’t wander into the house. What you can do is pay to use it, and on that front it does a lot.

The Dublin architect William Farrell remodelled the house in the 1820s, and around 1830 the theatrical Triumphal Arch Lodge went up at the gate. That lodge is the one part of the estate that occasionally opens to the public: for European Heritage Open Days in September 2025 it was open free for a day, and it can also be rented as self-catering accommodation through the Irish Landmark Trust.

The estate runs a full slate of country sports – deer stalking, driven snipe and woodcock shooting, clay-pigeon shooting and archery – along with trout and salmon fishing on the Colebrooke River, all by arrangement. For a quieter visit there are riverside and garden walks and purpose-built hides for watching otters, kingfishers and buzzards. There is also a day spa with an outdoor hot tub and sauna, installed during a restoration that featured on the television programme Country House Rescue in 2012.

To stay, the estate lets three self-catering cottages, bookable through colebrookecottages.com: Whitehill Cottage, a five-star bolthole for four; Woodcock Corner, open-plan and sleeping six; and Ashbrooke House, which takes up to sixteen for a group.

The village

Brookeborough itself is small and quiet, a single main street at the foot of Slieve Beagh, eleven miles east of Enniskillen just off the A4. The community centre occupies the old Clogher Valley Railway station, a reminder of the narrow-gauge line that ran through here until the 1940s, and the Heber McMahon grounds host the local Gaelic football. There is a village park for a stroll or a picnic, and a handful of churches, but little laid on for the passing tourist; treat the village as a base rather than a destination.

Getting there and nearby

Brookeborough sits right on the A4, the main road between Enniskillen and the route east toward Belfast, so it is easy to reach by car; public transport is thin, with only a couple of buses a day to Enniskillen. The nearest airport is City of Derry, about 45 km away.

It makes a reasonable base for the bigger Fermanagh draws: Florence Court, the National Trust mansion, is about 14 miles southwest, the Marble Arch Caves a little beyond at 17 miles, and Enniskillen, with its castle and museums, eleven miles west. If you are staying at Colebrooke, the Lough Erne lakeland is within easy reach for a day on the water.

Practical information