The Fiddlestone Bar has served drinks on Main Street for more than a century, and CAMRA lists it as the westernmost pub in the United Kingdom. This is a distinction Belleek can make honestly. The village sits where the River Erne leaves Lower Lough Erne and turns west for the Atlantic, and part of it crosses the river into County Donegal, which makes it the most westerly settlement in Northern Ireland, and therefore in the whole country.
The Fiddlestone was originally Hannah Moohan's. It still trades as a plain bar with a guesthouse and off-sales rather than anything food-led — a traditional Irish breakfast, live traditional music, and, CAMRA notes, a tendency to get busy at weekends. Its name comes from the Fiddler's Stone a few miles west at Castle Caldwell, a fiddle-shaped memorial to Denis McCabe, a fiddler hired to play on Sir James Caldwell's barge in 1770 who fell overboard and drowned while the guests, by all accounts drunk, failed to save him.
For a full meal you want the Black Cat Cove, further along Main Street, which serves from noon and puts on live music in the evenings. The menu runs to steak sandwiches, beer-battered cod, chicken carbonara, burgers with homemade chips, and cheesecake. Reviewers call it "good honest home cooked food ... the best pint in town," and it is priced accordingly.
The Thatch is the oldest building in the village, a thatched cottage from around 1830, and the only originally thatched house left in County Fermanagh. It pre-dates the pottery, which is saying something here. One of its occupants in the 1859 valuation was John Caldwell Bloomfield, who a couple of years earlier had founded Belleek Pottery. Home-made food has come out of it since the early 1900s, and it has been a coffee shop since 1995.
The pottery is why most people come. Bloomfield set it up in 1857 to provide work during hard times, using local kaolin and feldspar, and it is the oldest working fine-china pottery on the island of Ireland. The visitor centre draws around 150,000 people a year for factory tours, a museum, a showroom and a tea room. The lattice-work Belleek Basket, with its woven clay and hand-painted shamrocks, is still made largely by the same methods it was 165 years ago.
The industry marked the village so thoroughly that it turns up in the churches. The Church of Ireland parish church has three stained-glass Potters' windows commemorating the pottery's founders, and St Patrick's has a window of a potter's hands above the altar.
The walking is in the surrounding lakeland. Castle Caldwell Forest, four miles west, has waymarked lakeside trails and the RSPB birdlife of Lower Lough Erne — terns, curlews, lapwings. South-east, the Cliffs of Magho run for nine kilometres above the lake, up to 300 metres high, with views into Fermanagh, Sligo, Tyrone and Donegal.
Enniskillen is about 25 minutes east; Ballyshannon, over the border in Donegal, is ten. There is no station — the line closed in 1957 — so you will want a car. The market still runs on the third Tuesday of each month, quieter now than in the 1980s, when it spilled across the border.