Enniskillen

Enniskillen was our first foray into Northern Ireland. Their are a couple of obvious differences between Northern Ireland and The Republic of Ireland; firstly the speed changes from km to miles which was a bit difficult for Ewen at first because our car only had km listed. the second difference is that they use pounds instead of euros like the republic of Ireland. Another difference is that the Republic of Ireland is it's own country while Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. Pretty much all you notice is the currency change & the road signs change, there are no borders anymore so most of the time it isnt even obvious when you cross over the border from one part of Ireland to the other.
Enniskillen was a really nice little town, we stayed in a new hostel which had a good kitchen so we saved heaps of money cooking most nights we were there. We went to Enniksillen Castle which is more of a collection of buildings now, the fancy most castle like part is actually a water gate (i think that's what it was anyway). We went on a few walks through the town. we had lunch in the Buttermarket (an old market) where i had the most delicious strawberry smoothie! We went to a really old pub Ewen had read about, it had a Gothic style bar and you got to sit in little private booth things if you wanted to, their was even a door on each one that you could close if you wanted. We got a bit excited because they made a clover shape in the top of Ewen's Guinness.

Enniskillen castle

We spent a full day driving around to different areas just near Enniskillen, firstly we wanted to go to an island that had a monk tower on it (a tall tower that monks used to live in) but when we got to the pier we discovered the lake was frozen so no boats were running to the island. we spent ages throwing rocks onto the ice and testing the ice to see how long you could stand on it before it cracked. You can see Ewen been a little braver than me in the photo below.

Ewen testing the frozen lake from the snow covered jetty

Carved heat stone on Boa Island, 2000 years old

We also drove out to Boa Island (this one had a bridge) to go to a famous cemetery, it dates back from 400AD. In it are two carved stones, one if called the Lustymore Figure and the other is called Boa Island Figure. The Boa Island Figure is also called the Janus stone because it has two faces, this is the stone in the photo. Ewen got a bit frazzled with me because i was roughly brushing all the snow off it to take a photo and he seemed to think you shouldn't do this to a 2000 year old stone. It was a bit difficult to see anything in this cemetery because everything was covered in calf deep snow.
We went to a few other places in Enniskillen and on our drive around but these were the most interesting.
After Enniskillen we headed further up to Portrush.