Castle Balfour
Castle Balfour at Lisnaskea in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, is a ruined plantation-era castle built in the early seventeenth century by Sir James Balfour, a Scottish planter who had been granted lands in Fermanagh following the Plantation of Ulster. The castle is situated beside the Church of Ireland church in Lisnaskea town and represents the distinctive plantation castle tradition of early seventeenth-century Ulster, where Scottish and English settlers built defensible houses to establish their authority in a recently conquered landscape. Lisnaskea is a market town on the upper Erne waterway system in the lake district of Fermanagh, and the surrounding landscape of Lough Erne with its numerous islands, early Christian monasteries and wildlife habitats makes County Fermanagh one of the most beautiful and historically layered parts of Northern Ireland.