Donegal Town

The seat of the O'Donnells, lords of Tír Chonaill, whose castle stands on the Eske. The Annals of the Four Masters, begun in 1632 by friars of the Donegal Franciscan house then in refuge at Bundrowes, were the great compilation that preserved much of what we know of early Ireland, written as the Gaelic world was ending.

Donegal Town was the seat of the O'Donnells, the Gaelic kings of Tír Chonaill, whose castle stands on the River Eske, and who founded a Franciscan friary on the shore of Donegal Bay in the 15th century. It is often said the Annals of the Four Masters were written at that friary, but recent scholarship, drawing on the Franciscans' own records, places their compilation in 1632–36 at the refuge house at Bundrowes, near Bundoran, where the community had moved. The town was besieged in 1601 in the Nine Years' War.

After the Flight of the Earls in 1607 the castle was given to Captain Basil Brooke, ancestor of the Viscounts Brookeborough, who rebuilt it with a Jacobean wing around 1611 and laid out the town and its Diamond. From the late 17th century to the early 20th the town was part of the estates of the Gores, Earls of Arran, and took its present appearance under them. The workhouse buildings, now part of the hospital, and famine graves remain from the 1840s; in 1841 the town had 1,366 people.

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

• Donegal Castle · castle · under 1 km

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

• Boa Island figures · Two-faced 'Janus' idols in a Lough Erne graveyard, thought to date from the Iron Age, perhaps older than Christianity in Ireland. Which god they show, nobody knows.
• Lough Derg (St Patrick's Purgatory) · A cave Patrick was said to have seen Purgatory in, medieval Europe's most famous pilgrimage; pilgrims still fast barefoot for three days on the island.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.