Enniskillen - Inniskilling

Do not confuse Enniskillen (pronounced IPA: /ɛ nɪsˈkɪ lən/) and Inniskilling (pronounced IPA: /ɪ nɪsˈkɪ lɪŋ/). The former is the name of a town in the far west of Northern Ireland, the latter is (part of) the name of two (former) regiments in the British army.

Enniskillen, with a population of c14,000, is situated on and around an island in the river Erne and is the county town of Fermanagh, one of the six counties of Northern Ireland. The town was originally called Inniskilling, an anglicised version of its name in Irish, Inis Ceithleann, pronounced, roughly, inish kelling (or more accurately IPA: / ˈɪnʲɪʃ ˈcɛlʲən̪ˠ/), and meaning ‘Island of Ceithleann’. In Irish mythology Ceithleann, the wife of Balor, the leader of a tribe of giants, after fatally wounding the leader of a rival tribe in battle, swam across the river Erne to seek refuge on the island which now bears her name.

Enniskillen witnessed one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles in Northern Ireland between the late 1960s and 1998 - the Remembrance Day bombing. On 8th November 1987 the Provisional IRA detonated a bomb close to a Remembrance Day celebration at the war memorial in the centre of the town: the explosion left 11 dead and 63 injured.

The word Inniskilling is nowadays used exclusively as (part of) the name of two (former) regiments in the British army:

The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers was an Irish infantry regiment, formed in 1881 and amalgamated with other regiments in 1968 to form the Royal Irish Rangers, which in turn was merged in 1992 with the Ulster Defence Regiment to form the Royal Irish Regiment.

The Inniskillings (6th Dragoons) was a cavalry regiment. It fought, as Sir Albert Cunningham's Regiment of Dragoons, at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, and later saw service in the Napoleonic Wars, in Crimea, and in The First World War, before in 1922 becoming part of 5th/6th Dragoons.