Lough Beg & Church Island

A few kilometres below Toome the Lower Bann opens out into Lough Beg, the 'little lake', about 3 miles long and a mile across. Boats keep to the channel marked by perches; outside it the water is shallow. The lake and its flood meadows are a national nature reserve within the Lough Neagh Ramsar site, busy with swans, geese and ducks in winter and one of Ireland's main breeding grounds for the scarce garganey. Church Island held a monastery before the Vikings came. Its ruined church has no spire of its own: the one beside it was built in the late 18th century so that Bishop Hervey could see it from his house at Bellaghy. Since the river was dredged in the 1930s the 'island' can usually be reached on foot in summer. Seamus Heaney set his poem 'The Strand at Lough Beg' here.