Milestone 1 Mile, Near 11 Lough Yoan Road, Enniskillen, BT74 4GR

This is a limestone milestone dating from between approximately 1810 and 1835, situated at a distance of one Irish mile from Enniskillen along the former mail coach road to Dublin. It stands in the townland of Killyhevlin and is the most severely damaged of the twelve surviving stones in its series.

The milestone is one of an original set of seventeen that once marked every Irish mile from Enniskillen to the border of County Fermanagh along the road that ran through Cavan to Dublin. Twelve of the seventeen survive; two have been relocated and one was already listed before this assessment. The stones are carved from local limestone and are square in plan, rising just over one metre in height. They vary slightly in design, and their individual, uneven quality reflects the work of local craftsmen. In general, the stones taper gently to form an elongated prism, though this taper is less pronounced in some examples. While the front and rear faces are flat, the side elevations are more elaborate: they step outward at low level to define a base, then overhang at the top with a roll that tapers upward to a crown profile, completing an ornate terminus. This profiled top appears to be unique among known milestones in Britain and Ireland. The stones are positioned sideways on to the road so that they could be read from both directions of travel, and they are located on the left-hand side of the road to Dublin, many set well back from the carriageway on wide verges.

Each stone in the series originally gave distances to Dublin at the top, to Cavan in the centre (including fractions of a mile), and the distance from Enniskillen in whole miles at the bottom. This one-mile stone would likely have originally shown Dublin as 79.5 miles distant and Cavan as 24.5 miles. However, the stone has been severely damaged: all distance inscriptions have been lost and much of the upper fabric destroyed. The surviving limestone material and proportions nevertheless suggest it would once have closely resembled the other stones in the sequence. An alternative possibility is that this stone pre-dates the others, as it lies on a section of the old road to Dublin. Between 1857 and 1905, most likely as part of the 1905 Ordnance Survey of this part of Fermanagh, a crow's foot benchmark was carved into the stone; this too is now gone, though it is recorded on the third edition Ordnance Survey map at a height of 173.7 feet above sea level.

The milestones use Irish miles, which were officially phased out following the Weights and Measures Act 1824. However, the Irish Post Office continued to use the Irish mile in stamp cancellations and published distance tables until at least the 1850s, and as late as 1901 new fingerposts in Fermanagh were ordered to display Irish miles for consistency with existing milestones. A local Member of Parliament, Jeremiah Jordan, asserted in 1904 that there were no statute miles in Fermanagh. The locations of the milestones are likely to have been measured from the Market House and Town Hall in The Diamond at Enniskillen. Although some secondary sources claim measurement was taken from the post office, the early 19th century post office and Mr Hall's stables — the supplier of fresh horses for the mail coach — are known from Trimble's history of Enniskillen to have been located close to the Roman Catholic chapel in Church Street, which lies too far from the first milestone to have served as the starting point. After about 1830, the mail coaches stopped at Mr Liddle Baxter's premises at the Diamond, and drivers and guards lodged at Mrs Brady's hotel on the opposite side of the street, from which time the starting point would have matched the distances recorded on the milestones. It is probable that distances were measured using a perambulator — a calibrated measuring wheel — and a Mr James Hall, who may have been the same Mr Hall who supplied mail coach horses, was recorded on his death in 1824 as leaving among his possessions a perambulator in good order for measuring roads.

The road on which these milestones stand was built specifically to serve the mail coach system. Enniskillen was noted as a post town as early as 1659, and the town's postal connections were formalised when a separate Irish Post Office was established by Act of Parliament in 1784. In the later 18th century, mail to Enniskillen was carried from Dublin by a mounted postboy. Postboys and mail carts proved slow and vulnerable to attack and were gradually replaced by mail coaches, shortly after such a system was introduced in Britain. The first mail coaches in Ireland ran on the Dublin to Cork and Dublin to Belfast roads in 1789, and from 1803 a regular mail coach service began between Dublin and Enniskillen — a previous attempt having faltered during the 1798 rebellion. Despite the separate status of the Irish postal service, the coaches, drivers and guards used recognisably similar livery, equipment and operating practices to mail coaches in Britain, creating a unified system. The Dublin to Enniskillen mail coach was painted in black, maroon and gold livery and took part in ceremonial occasions; at the birthday of George IV in April 1822, it paraded with other mail coaches through Dublin, the rich scarlet coats, light vests and stylish cravats of the drivers being noted, along with the royal livery of the guards and the chronometers they wore on their chests to keep time.

When first established, the Dublin to Enniskillen mail coach travelled via Newtownbutler, Maguiresbridge and Lisbellaw, along a road likely in use since at least the early plantation period — Lisnaskea and Enniskillen having been strongholds of the Maguires — and shown on Herman Moll's 1695 map of Ireland. The four-horse coach left Dawson Street in Dublin at half past ten at night and arrived in Enniskillen the following evening at eight o'clock: a journey of twenty-one and a half hours. On its return, it left the Mail Coach Hotel in Enniskillen at eight in the morning and arrived in Dublin at six the following day.

The condition of the roads used by the coaches quickly became a concern. A statutory average speed of three and a half Irish miles per hour was required but was often impossible to maintain. The Highways (Ireland) Acts of 1805 and 1806 required surveys of all Irish post roads, with plans for new roads and improvements to increase road width to 42 feet and reduce gradients to less than 1 in 35. Surveys throughout Ireland were carried out by Major Alexander Taylor and a team of engineers between 1805 and 1816. Although resistance from County Grand Juries meant only a small proportion of Taylor's recommendations were implemented, the construction of new road sections on the route from Cavan to Enniskillen — effectively the stretches now known as the Gola Road and Crom Road — was one of the proposals that was adopted. A survey of the old road and the proposed new route is preserved among fourteen volumes of manuscript maps produced by Taylor and his team, now held by the National Library of Ireland.

The Irish Treasury advanced a total of £30,492 19s 4d to the Grand Jury of Fermanagh between 1810 and 1816 for the new road from Cavan to Enniskillen, comprising a stretch between Tallaght and Lisnaskea (the Gola Road) and a further stretch between Lisnaskea and Clonnaroo townland (the Crom Road). This was a presentment road rather than a turnpike — the only turnpike section on the Enniskillen to Dublin route being the Dublin to Navan stretch — and the cost was repaid to the Treasury from local taxation known as county cess. The road was then maintained by the county and baronies through which it passed, which granted five- or seven-year contracts for repairs. Grand Jury presentment books for Fermanagh, though incomplete, contain several references to the construction of the new line of mail coach road from Enniskillen to Cavan. Between 1808 and 1818 several individuals are named as being paid to construct stretches of road using stone and gravel, build bridges and erect fencing, including local landlords Lord Belmont, Reverend William Moffitt and Henry Brooke, as well as George and Henry Leslie and Richard Davies. The upper section of the road (Gola Road) appears from the annual Treble Almanack to have been completed by 1817, and the lower section (Crom Road) by 1823. The completed road is shown on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1834. By 1822 a government report found the last seventeen miles of the road from Dublin to Enniskillen to be in tolerable good order as newly built. The road was known locally as the Broad Road, since most presentment roads in Fermanagh at that time were little more than twenty feet wide. The Ordnance Survey Memoirs of 1834 to 1835 praise the road especially where it passes through the parish of Aghalurcher as perhaps a specimen of road making not to be surpassed anywhere, with an average breadth of 46 feet from fence to fence, judiciously laid throughout, the materials being broken limestone making a sound and durable surface. The road was narrower through Galloon parish at only 32 feet — a fact criticised by government inspectors shortly after construction — and widened again to 45 feet through Drummully parish, a short additional section built in 1829. However, through Enniskillen parish a stretch of the road lay below the winter level of Upper Lough Erne and was noted in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs as being almost every season overflowed by it for a considerable time.

The survival of the grand jury presentment books gives no direct information about the erection of the milestones along this road, either during construction or shortly after completion. It is known that the Grand Juries of Fermanagh often assumed responsibility for milestones on presentment roads. The precise spacing of mile markers would have been of primary importance to the mail coaches, whose guards used chronometers to keep to time. Mile markers were also essential for calculating postal charges, which prior to the introduction of the penny post in 1840 were calculated according to distance: sending a letter from Dublin to Enniskillen cost nine pence, prohibitively expensive for most people. Milestones also assisted general travellers in navigation and in knowing distances to the next town. The stones are believed to have been painted in the past to make them more prominent, typically with limewash and with lettering picked out in black, though it is unclear whether this series was painted in this way. The ten-mile stone currently has painted lettering, and surviving lettering on the eleven-mile stone is also painted.

The milestones use distances measured in Irish miles in both directions and are positioned sideways on to the road so that they could be read from either direction of travel, in a manner similar to stones on the Dublin to Navan stretch of the same route. The stones are located on the left-hand side of the road to Dublin, many set well back on wide verges that emphasise the breadth of the road. The relatively tall form of the stones may have been intended to keep them visible during flooding episodes: newspapers recorded in the winter of 1821 that floodwater was in places two feet deep on the mail coach road, and in severe winter floods the mail coach was sometimes compelled to use the old road through Maguiresbridge instead.

There was an earlier set of milestones along the old route from Cavan to Enniskillen, as attested by a travel guide of 1815 and by Taylor and Skinner's map of 1777. At points where the old and new routes intersected, the milestones would have clashed, and the old stones may have been removed after 1815. The mile-distances recorded by the two sets do not always correspond: for example, the old route placed Lisnaskea at 70 and a quarter miles from Dublin, while the position of the current milestone at Lisnaskea places it at 71 and a half miles from Dublin. The current stones have a profiled top of a form that appears to be unique. A number of later Irish milestones bearing the initials PO or GPO — assumed to have been erected by the Post Office — also rise to a point at the top, and while the current milestones carry no Post Office lettering, the stylistic flourish of the curved design may reflect an aspiration to match the prestige of the mail coach system as expressed through its liveried accoutrements.

Some damage to the milestones may be accounted for by natural weathering, but some stones are known to have been deliberately defaced. It was recorded in 1972 that the ten-mile marker at Killycrutten had been rescued and buried by a nearby householder when it was about to be destroyed by rebels in the 1920s and was later restored to its original position. It is also believed that milestones were sometimes defaced during the Second World War as a defensive strategy in case of German invasion.

Horses on the mail coach route normally had to be changed every eight to twelve Irish miles, and the Treble Almanack records stops at Wattlebridge and Lisnaskea. Newspaper reports confirm that in 1840 the inn used by the mail coach was in Lisnaskea near the ninth milestone, while the Ordnance Survey Memoirs record horse changes at Wattlebridge at the seventeenth milestone. A coaching inn in Clevaghy townland, opposite the eleventh milestone, was constructed by Colonel Madden of Hilton Park House in County Monaghan and was present by 1825, though the Ordnance Survey Memoirs record that it was never actually used as an inn. The Madden family had owned the nearby demesne of Manor Waterhouse from 1638 and had built a substantial dwelling house on the site of an earlier bawn; the empty house was pulled down by Madden to provide stone for building the coaching inn. According to Trimble, some of this stone may also have been used to build the road itself, and it is conceivable that some was used for milestones. Colonel Madden is named in the presentment books as undertaking subsidiary works on the road, particularly drains and bridges. This former coaching inn was listed in 1980 and remains intact with a substantial rear courtyard surrounded by double-height outbuildings, and its group value is noted in relation to the milestones. A further coaching inn is placed by W A McCutcheon in the neighbouring townland of Sallaghy, though no remains of it are known to survive.

The mail coach continued to use this road until 1859. With the opening of the Dublin and Drogheda Railway in 1844, mail for Enniskillen initially began travelling from Dublin to Drogheda by train and onwards by mail coach, but this arrangement failed and a direct mail coach from Enniskillen to Dublin was reinstated by 1849. That service finally ended in 1855 when the Dundalk and Enniskillen railway reached Newbliss, with mail carried to Enniskillen thereafter by a combination of the Derry and Belfast mail coaches travelling via Monaghan. The railway reached Enniskillen itself in 1859, bringing the mail coach era on this route to a close.

At the Spring Assizes of 1842 the Grand Jury of Fermanagh had already agreed to fund a new stretch of road from Newtownbutler to Wattlebridge, prompted by frustration in Newtownbutler at receiving Dublin mail via Lisnaskea, and with the expectation that the mail coach would be re-routed along it. This new road appears on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1857, though it is unclear whether it was completed in time for the mail coach to use it before the railways arrived. The lower section of the current road (Crom Road), bypassed by this re-routing through Newtownbutler, is today a classified minor road (C430). The upper section (Gola Road) continued to be the main highway from Enniskillen to Dublin for over a century after the mail coach era. With motorised transport it was designated a Class I road in 1923 and numbered as part of the A34. When the railways stopped operating in 1957 its importance increased once again, but it eventually became inadequate for rising traffic volumes and was rerouted via Maguiresbridge in the 1970s, after which Gola Road was reduced to a B road (B514). Survival of the milestones is better on the Crom Road, which appears to have been subjected to fewer road improvements than the Gola Road. The widths of the road today remain broadly consistent with those recorded in the 19th century, except near Enniskillen where the road has been widened and slightly rerouted. Apart from a milestone at Drumcru crossroads on the Crom Road — an entirely different type to the rest of the series, listed in 2005, and most likely erected at around the same time to direct visitors to the Crom estate — no other remnants of the mail coach era survive in the road's signposting or fabric.

As a group, these twelve surviving milestones constitute one of the most complete series of their kind in Northern Ireland and represent one of the few surviving physical components of the late 18th and early 19th century mail coach system, which was perhaps the single most important communications network established throughout Britain and Ireland before the coming of the railways. Although this particular stone is the most severely damaged of the surviving twelve, its matching limestone material, surviving proportions and accurate original location make a significant contribution to the narrative of the group.