Betty @ Belleek

Yesterday’s weather was not lovely, today’s is lovely. I posted some of today’s photos yesterday to spread the wealth.

This is the foyer of the Manor House:

Also the foyer...

Today we headed for Belleek, where we took a tour of the factory.

It was really interesting. A Lord Bloomfield inherited large swaths of land around Belleek in, let’s say, early 1800s. He was a mineralogist and saw that the soil around Belleek (not far from where the River Erne opens into the Atlantic) had all the ingredients needed to make fine china. Belleek Pottery was born.

This woman is making a Belleek woven basket. Wet strips of clay are laid on a diagonal and connected to the woven base. Then more strips are laid on a diagonal in the opposite direction. Mindblowing.

This woman is painting flowers on a basket. The flowers are made out of dozens of individual petals, also mind-blowing.
From there onto the lovely wee town of Ballyshannon, where I was partly successful in getting a view of the Erne meeting the Atlantic. We parked by what was once a busy port where the Erne empties into an estuary. There was a plaque commemorating a few dozen men who, between 1925 and 1933, successfully fought to return the rights to fish on the River Erne to the public. The crown seized control of the Erne (and many rivers in the British Isles), so only noblemen and their buddies could fish in them. The Erne is an important salmon river--imagine forbidding local people from fishing it during the famine? But that’s what happened.
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