Overview
Colebrooke Park is not a place you can just turn up and walk around. It is the private seat of the Viscounts Brookeborough, and the present head of the family, Alan Brooke, 3rd Viscount Brookeborough, is Lord Lieutenant of Fermanagh and sat for years as an elected hereditary peer in the House of Lords. The estate runs to around 1,000 acres of parkland, woodland and riverbank near Brookeborough and Maguiresbridge, and it earns its keep as a working sporting estate: cottages to let, fishing and shooting by arrangement, and the big house available for weddings and corporate stays. Access is by appointment, with one reliable exception, the gate lodge, below.
The house and the Brookes
The Brookes were a plantation family, granted confiscated land here after the 1641 rebellion, and they have held Colebrooke ever since. The present house was built around 1820 for Sir Henry Brooke to designs by the Dublin architect William Farrell. Farrell also gave the estate its set-piece entrance, the Triumphal Arch Lodge, a Grade B listed, triple-arched gatehouse of about 1830 built to stage the approach to the house.
The family’s most famous names belong to the last century. Colebrooke was home to Field Marshal the 1st Viscount Alanbrooke, Churchill’s chief of the imperial general staff through the Second World War, and to Basil Brooke, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1943 to 1963.
Staying, fishing and shooting
The estate lets a handful of self-catering properties, restored with their period character kept intact. The pick of them for anyone interested in the history is the Triumphal Arch Lodge, conserved by the Irish Landmark Trust and now a holiday let sleeping four, you rent the actual arch. Larger groups take Ashbrooke House (sleeps 16), or the smaller Whitehill Cottage and Woodcock Corner. The main house has twelve double bedrooms and a conference suite that seats up to seventy, and can host receptions for up to 300.
For anglers, Colebrooke has about three miles of private water on the Colebrooke River, fished by permit through the estate office, for game and coarse fish. The estate also runs clay pigeon shooting, archery, deer stalking and wildlife-watching from purpose-built hides, red squirrels, deer and otters all live on the ground. There is a spa in one of the courtyards, open by appointment.
Practical information
- Location – Colebrooke Park, Brookeborough, County Fermanagh, off the A4. It is about 90 minutes from Belfast and 40 minutes from the west coast, close to Lough Erne.
- Access – By appointment only; this is a private home. Cottage and fishing bookings and sporting enquiries go through the estate office at colebrooke.info or on 028 8953 1402.
- The one free day – The Triumphal Arch Lodge opens to the public, free, during European Heritage Open Days, usually a day in mid-September.
- Dogs – Welcome on the walks but kept on leads, and close the gates behind you.
Nearby
A short drive opens up some of Fermanagh’s best houses and glens:
- Castle Coole – an 18th-century Palladian mansion in wide parkland.
- Castle Balfour – a 17th-century plantation castle ruin in nearby Lisnaskea.
- Florence Court – a Georgian house and forest park under the National Trust, about 25 km away.
- Cladagh Glen – a wooded river walk with old oaks and a waterfall.
- Brookeborough – the estate’s namesake village, with a couple of pubs and shops.
Cottage and fishing dates go quickly for summer weekends, so contact the estate office well ahead.