FEATURE CASE STUDY
Enniskillen Workhouse
E
ngraved on the floor as you enter the newly restored Enniskillen Workhouse are the words of WB Yeats, “A pity beyond all telling” from his poem, The Pity of Love. The concept of the workhouse can send a shiver down the spine, the buildings being designed both to provide relief for the poor of the parish but also to deter them from too readily availing themselves of such help as was offered. As Curl notes “… the architecture itself was often as repellent as the régime. It is no accident that Union workhouses were hated and feared, and that even their appearance could chill stout hearts.” 1 In 1839 the Oxford architect, George Wilkinson, was employed by the Poor Law Commissioners for Ireland as their architect to design and build their workhouses. Initially appointed for one year, he was to remain in post until 1855. The workhouses he
designed, Enniskillen being one of them, had three main parts: the front building, the main building or “body of the house”, and the infirmary building. In his survey of Ulster workhouses, Gould records that the Enniskillen workhouse was completed on the 19th March 1844 for 1000 inmates.2 It closed in 1948 but continued to serve as a hospital, being gradually subsumed into the new Erne Hospital before all but the front building was demolished to make way for South West College’s Erne Campus. When the Johnston Bridge was built in 1954, the orientation of the hospital changed, and the old workhouse now faces the former approach via Erne Rd, becoming less of an entrance as originally intended, being located at the rear of the campus.
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