Donegal Castle

The name Dún na nGall translates as fort of the foreigner, and may recall a Viking fortress destroyed in the area in 1159 — though hundreds of years of building over the ground have left no archaeological trace of it. The castle itself came much later. Hugh Roe O'Donnell I, a wealthy chief of the O'Donnells, raised it in the 1460s or early 1470s, on a bend of the River Eske near the mouth of Donegal Bay. His family were Lords of Tír Conaill and, from the fifth century to the sixteenth, among the most powerful Gaelic dynasties in Ireland. In 1474 Hugh Roe and his wife Nuala founded a Franciscan friary further down the river; local tradition holds that a tunnel joined the two, but no evidence of one has been found.

In 1566 the English Lord Deputy of Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney, visited Donegal and wrote to William Cecil, the Lord High Treasurer and later Baron Burghley, calling it "the largest and strongest fortress in all Ireland". He went further: "it is the greatest I ever saw in an Irishman's hands: and would appear to be in good keeping; one of the fairest situated in good soil and so nigh a portable water a boat of ten tonnes could come within ten yards of it". The castle was reckoned one of the finest Gaelic castles in Ireland, and the judgement came from the Crown's own chief officer in the country.

In 1607, after the Nine Years' War, the leaders of the clan left Ireland in the Flight of the Earls, and on their way out they severely damaged the tower house, so that it could not be turned against the Gaelic clans they were leaving behind. It did not stay broken long. During the Plantation of Ulster the castle and its lands were granted to an English captain, Basil Brooke, who had the keep quickly repaired and then remade it — new windows, a gable, and a large manor-house wing in the Jacobean style set against the fifteenth-century tower.

The Brookes held Donegal until the 1670s, when they moved to near Lisnaskea in County Fermanagh and sold the castle to the Gore dynasty, who later became Earls of Arran in the Peerage of Ireland. Under the Gores it fell into a ruinous state in the early eighteenth century, and for most of the last two centuries the majority of the buildings lay in ruins. In 1898 the 5th Earl of Arran vested the castle in the Office of Public Works.

The Office of Public Works partially restored the site in the early 1990s, re-roofing and re-flooring the tower house in keeping with the styles and techniques of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, repairing the stonework, and putting a partial roof over the manor wing. Some of the oak timbers came from the Colebrooke Estate outside Brookeborough — the same County Fermanagh the Brookes had left Donegal for three centuries before.