"she can remember hearing the horses towing the big guns down the Shore Road down to take part in the Battle of Belleek"

Interviewer: Fred, you said you were going to mention something else there.

Fred: I don’t know what it was but something else I could tell you about the time the Battle of Belleek or Pettigo or whatever it was called. The Battle of Belleek was around the time of partition 1921, 1922.  My mother’s family had moved to Fermanagh, because her father was left a farm here, she was born in the Newtownabbey area, what’s now known as Newtownabbey but at that time there wouldn’t have been very many houses. They’d moved to here and she could remember, they lived near here but reasonably high up, a bit higher than here and she can remember hearing the horses towing the big guns down the Shore Road down to take part in the Battle of Belleek.  The sound carried across the Lough, and she could hear the noise of the horses and the gun carriage and all the rest of it.  She can remember that but that’s her only memory of it.

Interviewer: That’s extraordinary because we don’t think of the troubles at that time as involving big guns, heavy guns artillery and so on but the Battle of Belleek, Pettigo obviously was quite a substantial one.

Fred: I don’t think there were that many rounds fired out of the big guns but there were some fired. I remember my brother-in-law; his relatives lived near Pettigo, and he said that they either fired from near their house or whether the shell went over their house, I’m not quite sure but obviously he had heard stories about it as well you know.