Bundoran

Donegal's most southerly town and a seaside resort since the 18th century, when Viscount Enniskillen built a summer lodge here in 1777 and others followed for the sea air. The railway made it one of Ulster's main resorts, and in 2012 National Geographic listed it among the world's top 20 surf towns. Mícheál Ó Cléirigh worked on the Annals of the Four Masters at the Franciscan house of Bundrowes, in what is now the town.

Bundoran grew from a Gaelic coastal and fishing community tied to the Bundrowes salmon fishery. In 2025 the local historian Éamon Ó Caoineachán identified references from 1606, in a letter of Attorney General John Davies and in a Folliott family claim to fishing rights at 'Bondrone', which are now the earliest known records of the town. In the 1630s the Franciscan house at Bundrowes was Mícheál Ó Cléirigh's main base while the Annals of the Four Masters were compiled (1632–1636). In 1689 a skirmish was fought nearby between Jacobites and the retreating Protestant garrison of Sligo. Viscount Enniskillen built Bundoran Lodge as his summer home in 1777, and others soon came for the seaside and its supposed health benefits.

Canon Kelaghan, who built the Catholic church in 1859, went to court in 1870 to keep the paths to the beach open to the public after a landlord blocked them. The Enniskillen and Bundoran Railway opened in 1868 and by the end of the century Bundoran was one of Ulster's main resorts, with the railway's Great Northern Hotel among its landmarks. Partition in 1922 left the line running through Northern Ireland, and it closed in 1957. On 8 August 1980 a fire at the Central Hotel killed ten people, five of them children.

Drawn from the History section of the Wikipedia article on Bundoran ↗, rewritten here and adding nothing it does not say; licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

• Ballyshannon Castle · castle · 7 km

Straight-line distances from the town centre, from each site's documented coordinates.

• Benbulben — Diarmuid's death · End of the great elopement: Diarmuid, who fled with Gráinne from Fionn, is gored by the enchanted boar here, and Fionn lets the healing water run through his fingers.
• Glencar — the stolen child · Yeats put this waterfall into a poem in 1886 and the faeries came with it: they call a child away from a world too full of weeping. It is a made thing, not an old story — but people have been coming to look at the water because of it for well over a century now.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.