Slieve Russell Hotel Golf & Country Club

The name comes from Sliabh Ros-in — "mountain of the little wood" in Irish — a 404-metre peak straddling the Cavan–Fermanagh border. County Cavan is called the Lake County for good reason: 365 lakes, one for every day of the year according to the local count, and the source of the River Shannon in the bogland to the south. During construction of the golf course in the early 1990s, a megalithic wedge tomb approximately 4,000 years old was discovered on the hillside and relocated to the estate grounds under government supervision. It sits there still.

The resort was built by Sean Quinn — a Fermanagh man who became, briefly, one of Ireland's richest, and who poured an extraordinary amount of his early fortune into building a world-class destination in a corner of Ireland that most people drove past. The hotel opened in 1990; Patrick Merrigan completed the golf course in 1992. Merrigan built the layout around two large lakes connected by a stream, with the back nine wrapping around Lough Rud. Fifty acres of water comes into play across the card. The terrain is not flat drumlins parkland — Merrigan used the natural contours for genuine elevation changes, and the conditioning throughout is maintained to a standard that embarrasses courses charging twice the price. After Quinn's empire collapsed, the resort passed into IBRC receivership and stayed there for over a decade. In October 2024 it was sold for €30 million to Tony Brady — a Cavan man who had emigrated to Australia in 1973 as a bricklayer, built a hotel portfolio in Melbourne, and came home to buy the place back.

Leona Maguire, who would become the finest Irish woman golfer of her generation and a Solheim Cup hero, grew up in Ballyconnell and learned to play on the par-3 Academy Course here with her twin sister Lisa. Des Smyth won the Irish PGA Championship at Slieve Russell in 1996. The course carries a PGA National Ireland designation — one of eight PGA National courses worldwide.

The Shannon-Erne Waterway runs through Ballyconnell itself, a few minutes from the resort. The canal connection between Lough Erne and the Shannon took eight years to build and opened in 1860 to almost complete indifference — over the entire decade of the 1860s, eight boats used it, earning £18 in tolls. It was revived as a cross-border peace project in 1994 and now draws tens of thousands of pleasure boats through the canal system each season. Percy French, who wrote "Come Back Paddy Reilly to Ballyjamesduff" and "The Mountains of Mourne," lived in Cavan. Ballyjamesduff is twenty minutes away.