The county with some of the best beaches in Ireland
Long, long ago I came up from Letterkenny on a bus with hard seats, creaking springs and panels pitted with rust. I started that morning in Sligo, and it was my third bus of the day. Ellistrin, Kilmacrennan, Creeslough and up past the Ards Forest to Dunfanaghy: rivers, men on bicycles, dogs chasing cars, bog cutters, hay gatherers, children with ice-cream cones, water rushing everywhere, the sun on leaf, bog, stone, eye, cheek. On through Falcarragh and Gortahork, then straight west on to the Bloody Foreland and there it was, the Atlantic waters shimmering gold, brown wrack and cream beaches, the pale grey islands of the Rosses and Gweedore like discs of smoke.
Line KleinI was 22 and had come from Chicago to live for a summer on one of these islands. A poet who looked like Hemingway from his Cuban period had told me he’d bought a house there he’d never slept in, and if I was ever in Ireland I could stay in it. The island was called Gola, and like García Márquez’s Macondo it had lived for a hundred years but was now deserted. In the foreground below me, as the bus moved along a hill, was a landscape of tiny fields, dunes, rocks and a density of houses that were home to the descen-dants of Gaels driven into this beautiful and impossible place by the armies of Cromwell and his successors.
Pictured: Tea at Coffee Go Leor
Line KleinThe house on Gola was built by Hughie Sweeney, a rangy fisherman with fast blue eyes who had raised a family in it until he migrated with everyone else to the mainland. It was exposed to the wind on a high rise, had a broken window, a damp mattress, no electricity, no plumbing of any kind, not even a sink. Sheep grazed below the window. Two donkeys called in for bread every day. I’d come from the clamourousness of student life in the USA into this epic silence and isolation. I collected turf, wrote letters, had dreams of looking at a blank page and not filling it. I walked the cliffs and pathways and looked through the windows of houses suspended at the point of departure – a jacket on the back of a chair, a tin of soup with a spoon in it. When I ran out of food I took a lift with lobster fishermen into Bunbeg, where I bought supplies from Matt Bonner’s shop and stayed overnight in Hiúdaí Beag’s, the pub and guesthouse of a Gaelic football legend, where I heard wild tunes at night and was cooked breakfast by Hiúdaí’s wife Kitty the next morning. Then I went back. The fishermen tied knots with a magical dexterity and could read the sky. I never returned to the USA to live.
Pictured: Cow grazing
Line KleinFour decades later, we dropped down under a low sky in an Aer Lingus prop plane and looped the Gweedore coast, twice overflying Gola. It looked like a goose in flight, the beach headland like an outstretched neck, the westward cliffs like wings. I scanned for the Sweeney house, but couldn’t pick it out from the air. We came down on the airstrip at Carrickfinn, dunes rippling along the line of sand, the wings tipping like a seesaw. There was a wind out there that could throw you into a wall. Rain lashed. We picked up a car and squinted through the windscreen all the way to the thatched cottage on Cruit Island where we were to stay. Turf was heaped in the fireplace. The house was one of a cluster developed by retired schoolteacher Conor Ward and his wife Mary, a beach on one side and cliffs on the other. ‘We had an Irish thatcher once, and Shannon reeds, but the thatchers are Polish now and the reeds come from Turkey.’ ‘Is it often like this?’ I asked. ‘In winter the spume flies right over the house. You wouldn’t come to Donegal for the weather.’
Pictured: Houses on Gola island with Owey in the background
Line KleinWe were in a remote part of Ireland’s most remote county. The 1922 border cut it off from Derry and left only a slender link to the Republic in its south-west corner. Donegal is wide and tall and populous, its northernmost point reaching further than anything in Northern Ireland. But it’s said to be Ireland’s forgotten county, only dimly perceived from Dublin. It grew in its own way, tangential rather than incorporated, communal, independent, supplying gene-rations of potato harvesters to Scotland and tunnellers to England.
Pictured: Old photograph at Donegal Thatched Cottages
Line KleinYou wouldn’t come for the weather, but you might for the beaches. Carrickfinn by the airport or Port Arthur below Derrybeg are among the most glorious. You may walk them or scores of others in an oilskin, but you will likely be alone in an amphitheatre of marram grass and sea spume and delicate sand. Or you may come to drive one of the grandest stretches of the Wild Atlantic Way, a signposted route along the whole of the west coast, or to climb conical Mount Errigal, slate or beige or pink according to the light, or to kayak or fish or golf (try the rollercoaster of a course at the tip of Cruit Island), or to walk through the forest and bogland of Glenveagh National Park, with its grave castle on a lake, or to sail into the Poisoned Glen at Dunlewey, with its ruined church and ghost dressed in green, who cursed the landlord who evicted her with generations of childlessness. ‘And it held true,’ said the boatman. ‘There wasn’t a child born in the big house after.’
Pictured: A beachcombed haul
Line KleinMyth and legend walk with the people here, perhaps as they did in ancient Greece and rarely do now in the rest of Ireland. Brian O’Domhnaill, Gaeilgeoir (Irish language enthusiast), connoisseur of sean nós (unaccompanied) singing and perhaps the most renowned chef in West Donegal, pointed mournfully at a statue of Cúchulainn in a corner of his restaurant, Danny Minnie’s in Annagry. ‘He was our most beautiful, our most noble warrior, trained by a woman named Scáthach on the Isle of Skye along with Ferdia. Cúchulainn and Ferdia were like brothers, but Queen Meadhbh set them against each other with lies. They fought on the battleground all day with spears, then at night they came together to eat and talk and tend to each other’s wounds.’ Whatever about Meadhbh and Cúchulainn, the treachery and the pathos in the story were as real to him as the rain.
Pictured: Painted table at Donegal Thatched Cottages
Line KleinMairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, the great fiddler and singer with the band Altan, told me: ‘The reason I play music is because of those tales. They’re full of magic and romance and the feeling that anything at all could happen. My father taught me the fiddle and made those stories part of our everyday lives. We had to cast a look out at Na Trí Mic O gCorra rocks in the sea in case Tory Island would revert to heathenism. The big boulder at Crolly was supposed to have been thrown by Fionn MacCumhaill at Diarmuid and Gráinne because he was jealous. The legend was that the stone would fall when the most beautiful and honest couple in Ireland passed by. “It trembled a little when your mother and I walked under it!” my father said.’ Rocks: impossible to plough, but fruitful for legends.
Pictured: Coffee Go Leor in Falcarragh
Line KleinYou might come for the music, and you would not be wrong. It is played with such conviction at night that it seems the next day to score the landscape. We heard it not far from the judgemental rock at Crolly in Leo’s Tavern, named for Leo Brennan, father to Enya and the musicians of Clannad. Children with metal on their shoes danced a hurricane set to a bagpipe. I’ve been to hundreds of sessions in Ireland and London and Chicago, but few could match the one we saw at Danny Minnie’s, where a nine-year-old wizard on the fiddle played and Anraí O’Domhnaill, a special forces veteran who once swam the circumference of Ireland, sang. As did his wife and young daughters and girls from the youth music organisation An Crannóg, the songs’ meanings explained throughout the evening by Brian O’Domhnaill.
Pictured: The Lobster Pot
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Line KleinThe past began eerily and beguilingly to assemble when we got to Bunbeg, where at Caife Kitty I saw in the eyes and brow of its owner, Kathleen Bonner, those of her late father Matt, who had run the shop next door. Hiúdaí Beag’s was still across the street and so, astonishingly, was Kitty Gallagher, by then in her 90s, and tapping her foot to the jigs and reels at the Monday night session. She told me she was past her ‘sell-by date’ and just waiting to take on ‘the job of bouncer at the gates of hell for the Man Below. I think it would suit me.’ Her eyes flashed as the music escalated.
Pictured: Local pub sign
Line KleinThe next day Sabba Curran took us out in The Cricket to Gola and listened as I told him of the summer I spent here 40 years before. ‘There’s not many get into my boat with a story like that,’ he said. The house, I learned, had come back to the Sweeneys through Jimmy, a neighbour of Sabba and son of Hughie, the man who had built it. We pulled into the slip and walked the low rise to the house, fresh with paint now. I walked all around it and looked through the windows. Fine wooden floors, a bright kitchen, comfortable bed and pictures of Hughie himself on the walls, a place snatched from abandonment, like the island itself. We walked the beach, past restored homes and out to the cliffs, cormorants, razorbills and guillemots gliding and dipping above, the heather in bloom, sunlight on the sea. Things rarely seem more beautiful than you remember them, but here they were.
Pictured: Wild thistles by the shore
Line KleinYou could come above all for the people. There is poverty here and the emigration, reaching to Australia now, has returned with force. But even with this melancholy in the air, the people are unusually direct and fast in making a connection. You feel you would have to do something special to earn their suspicion. Usually in travel you can admire or be fascinated or disturbed by the people, but you remain a spectator. Here you are hauled unexpectedly into the scene. You are watching the music and through some
mysterious effortlessness you are suddenly in the music. It is like a play repeatedly breaching the fourth wall.GETTING AROUND
The Cricket skipper Sabba Curran sails twice daily in the summer and by appointment from Magheragallon pier. +353 872 245881; sabba@toryseaanglingcharters.ie. For more information about
visiting Donegal, go to ireland.comPictured: The Irish Tricolour
Line KleinWHERE TO STAY in Donegal
Donegal Thatched Cottages are traditional houses on Cruit Island, with the warmth and intimacy of a turf fire and the drama of a booming sea just beyond the window. Kevin Boyle, the son of an Arranmore native who emigrated to Chicago and made his fortune in biscuits, has refurbished the Waterfront Hotel in Dungloe. The rooms are not large, but have smart finishes and the place has ambitions for a Michelin-starred restaurant. Danny Minnie’s in Annagry, presently the best place to eat in the area, has a small collection of beautiful rooms filled with antiques and pieces the family has brought from all around Europe. And Braec House is a cleverly retrofitted 1980's bungalow turned B&B.
Donegal Thatched Cottages, donegalthatchcottages.com; from about £430 per week (sleeps five).
Waterfront Hotel, waterfronthoteldungloe.ie; doubles from about £70.
Danny Minnie’s, dannyminnies.ie; doubles from about £95
Braec House, breac.house; doubles from about £265 per night (two nights minimum)
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Pictured: Breakfast at Coffee Go Leor
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Line KleinPainted table at Donegal Thatched Cottages
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Line KleinSalad of beetroot, feta, beans, quinoa and slaw at Florence Food Co
Line KleinPictured: Donegal landscape