It's fun to slip off the coil of everyday identity so easily, to become a boat person.The soft drub of our engine seems to echo evermore with the gathering dusk. The deserted jetty in the lee of a tiny lake island is too tempting to ignore. Cattle have been shipped over here and they come to peer at our bonfire. Later, the moon sails over the borderless sky and makes plate glass of the water It's a thrilling time of no noise Of eventual darkness. It's as if we've shrunk ourselves into a world within a world.By six in the morning on these lakes, the birds who've sung the dawn chorus are already in rehearsals for the matinee.

For if boats can sail unhindered east and west, unmindful of their status under the Geneva Convention, then why not likewise cars and bikes, north and south? And people?Pondering these matters we creep ever eastwards. The enigma of arrival is never felt more keenly than on these waterways. After hours and hours of river bends, the tiniest town suddenly appears in the way a new civilisation does to the Starship Enterprise. Most moorings are equipped with clean, serviced and efficient shower and toilet facilities, operated in many cases with the same plastic card that opens and closes the no-longer-intimidating locks. "Every weekend I'd see them folks yonder when they'd come this way for their shopping.

Now there's some of them that I haven't seen for as long as 20 years."Yet there's hope, in the form of a proposed new bridge, a project born during the fragile peace and still tenderly wished for by everyone. Whereas his father would have slipped across into Belturbet for a pint, Christopher and his brothers, who like most of the families near Aghalane are Protestants, now drive to Derrylin which lies in the opposite direction. And in a symbol even more potent than the blown bridge at Aghalane, you suddenly realise that these two young men, brought up in the years of no bridge, speak in different accents: Larry in the flat vowels of County Cavan, Christopher in the honed lilt of Fermanagh. For centuries, the granite spans of the bridge at Aghalane allowed the commerce and the vowels of the two counties to mingle. Now the bridge is gone and the river has cut a ravine not just between childhood friendships but across the very language they share."Sure, Storey Bullock had an accent as thick as me own," says Charlie McKeown, a small farmer and county council worker on the Republic bank He looks north.

"Now the only time I might see him would be in Ballyconnell." He scratches his head. "I know every single soul between here and Belturbet, but apart from the Bullocks, I don't know a solitary one over on that side."Christopher Bullock agrees. "Myself and Christopher Bullock used to canoe together as kids," says Larry, a Catholic like everyone on this bank. In 1972 the British Army blew the bridge to smithereens, and also made Aghalane into a place at the end of nowhere.Larry Lee, 27, is the son of a dairy farmer on the Republic bank, a holler away from the Bullock household. "But if you wanted to live, you had to button your lip."The bridge at Aghalane connected Fermanagh to the Irish market town of Belturbet, two miles away. With her three sons, Joan runs a 100-acre dairy farm along the Fermanagh river banks.

She looks back down at her mesmerisingly pretty garden to the fairies' place near the water. Joan's brother-in-law, Tommy Bullock, and his wife, Emily, were shot dead in their kitchen.Their house over there, grey and stark, has stood empty ever since. Every family in the neighbourhood has known sadness arising from the political strife. For the border laid down in the Treaty negotiated between Lloyd George and Michael Collins back in 1922 runs along the centre of this waterway like the edge of a knife."We knew who the terrorists were," nods Joan, whose husband, Storey, died in 1992. A little nudge of the bow, then a touch of reverse to bring in the stern and you're slotting this leviathan into berths the size of dental cavities."I think that children used to come down to places like this in the evenings, and think that they were seeing fairies," says Joan Bullock, with a smile. We're standing at the end of her fairy-tale garden in Aghalane, watching troupes of dragonflies performing along the banks of the river. In the uncanny quietness you can hear cattle munching before you can see them.