These Irish name elements are associated with this record in the Logainm glossary.
An element’s translation is a clue, rather than a complete explanation of the name. Its form and meaning depend on local history and the full Irish name.
Recorded forms
Bealach na Leice· Irish · main form · validated name
Bellanaleck· English · main form
Place & story
Cleenish comes ashore
Cleenish Parish Church was built around 1763 in Bellanaleck. Its name recalls nearby Cleenish Island, one of the religious sites of Lough Erne and the location of the earlier church. The village building therefore retains an island identity on the mainland. The parish’s later organisation also changed: Mullaghdun originated as a separate rural curacy in 1817, before the two parishes were grouped together again in 1978.[2]
An eighteenth-century church with later work
The church combines a hall and tower of eighteenth-century origin with alterations by the architectural practice of Welland and Gillespie in 1869. Their work included the east window, benches and a cantilevered gallery at the west end. The parish records three stained-glass windows and two monuments dating from the seventeenth century. Its interior thus brings together memorials older than the present church with furnishings added more than a century after its construction.[2]
Recovering a post-war island settlement
In 2014 Bellanaleck Local History Group received Heritage Lottery funding to investigate the settlement of former servicemen on Cleenish Island after the First World War. Twelve veterans had received houses and holdings of roughly thirty to forty acres, in a place then lacking a mainland bridge and basic services. Almost all eventually left. The project sought to reconstruct their experiences through surviving houses, research and recorded memories, connecting the village’s historical work with the island that gave its church its name.[3]
Both censuses use the same 2015 settlement boundary. These exact counts cover usual residents in the settlement, rather than local government districts or historic counties. Other NISRA tables may use approximate counts.
View population figures
BELLANALECK — Settlement 2015 (N11000334) — census population
Cleenish Parish Church, Bellanaleck, County Fermanagh illustration: based on a The Church of Ireland Parish Church at Bellanaleck (27 June 2011) by Eric Jones. AI-assisted watercolour and ink adaptation; cream paper margins added, incidental clutter omitted and fine details simplified. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.
placenames