Lough Erne county fits the bill
32 Counties visits Fermanagh
THE DRUMBEAT thudded through the sound of rushing water. It sounded as if someone had piped disco music into this primeval space. We were 60 metres (125 feet) underground on the banks of a subterranean river when the modern world appeared to intrude.
But it had not. This was the sound of tonnes of water slamming into a cavity in the rock that is being worn away, year by year, century by century, millennium by millennium, to create the Marble Arch Caves.
As caves go, these are young, perhaps a million or so years old. That’s why the stalactites, the hanging spikes of rock that grow as calcium-laden water drips down and leaves a microscopic deposit with each drop, are quite small here.
But that doesn’t matter. What matters is the extraordinary sensation of walking along by a gushing, rushing torrent as it powers its way along the bed it has worn through the limestone.
Ten tonnes a second flows through here during the kind of rainy weather we have had for what seems like an age, and the level is so high that our tour is shorter than normal.
We do not get the opportunity to take the boat from the “wet” entrance to the cave as did the first human to explore it, the French speleologist Edouard Martel in 1895.
It felt like the kind of place where no living thing would venture, but then there was a sudden movement and a young frog hopped from the shadows onto a rock. A tiny highlight of an extraordinary experience.
The Marble Arch Caves were the first stop on our visit to Fermanagh, and a spectacular introduction to a county that has a lot to offer, even in fairly dismal weather.
A nearby attraction was the Cuilcagh Boardwalk Trail, culminating in the “Stairway to Heaven” with its spectacular views, but the prospect of a drenching half-way up sidelined that to another time.
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