Blakes ofthe Hollow

Blakes of the Hollow is one of the great Victorian bars of Ireland: a long, dark room off Church Street in Enniskillen whose interior, dating to an 1887 refit, sits on CAMRA's National Inventory at the top three-star grade — a pub 'of outstanding national historic importance', left substantially as it was. The Blake family kept it from 1929, and since 1996 it has been owned by another independent Enniskillen publican, Pat Blake, who has added a restaurant upstairs without touching the bar below. Front of house it is unchanged: the snugs, the counter, the fittings of a serious Victorian pub. One of only a handful of interiors in Northern Ireland the trade rates this highly.