Sir James Caldwell was the owner of Castle Caldwell, near Belleek, and a patron of musicians. In August 1770 a fiddler in his employ, Denis McCabe, was playing aboard Sir James's barge, the St Patrick, when he fell into Lower Lough Erne and drowned. Accounts vary on the date: the memorial's transcribed inscription is given in one source as the 13th and in another as the 15th. The agricultural writer Arthur Young's account of his Irish tour is said to mention a drowned fiddler near Herring Island, later miscopied as Heron Island.
A stone cut in the shape of a violin was set up on the Rossbeg point where he died. Its inscription records that he fell out of the barge and was drowned off this point, and goes on to a rhyming warning to fiddlers to keep away from the deep and play on dry land. The stone has since been moved several times, stood against the castle wall and at the railway station, and now stands at the entrance to the forest park. A later hand seems to have added the letters D.D.D. and J.J., which no one has explained.
Spirited Isle adds the ghost story. It says guests were largely too drunk to help, and that on still, moonlit nights the sound of a fiddle is said to carry faintly through the trees. The account of drunkenness is a common retelling and is not in the inscription. The drowning and the stone are fact; the music is a local reputation.
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