Things to do
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Silver Strand
A horseshoe of pale sand at Malin Beg reached down a hundred and seventy-four concrete steps, walled by cliffs on both sides and often completely empty. There are no facilities of any kind at the bottom, and the steps are the only way back up.
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Bluestack Mountains
A range of rounded granite hills rising to six hundred and seventy-four metres at Croaghgorm, with the Bluestack Way running through them and almost no path on the tops. Navigation is by map and compass and the ground is deep bog.
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Cloghanmore Court Tomb
A large neolithic court tomb in a walled enclosure in Glencolmcille, with two galleries opening off a full oval court and early Christian cross slabs standing among the stones. It is reached across fields off the Malin More road, and the gate is signed from the village.
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Donegal Castle
An O'Donnell tower house of 1474 with a Jacobean wing added by Sir Basil Brooke after 1610, restored in the 1990s with Persian rugs and French tapestries and a carved sandstone fireplace. It stands on the bank of the Eske in the middle of the town.
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Donegal Friary
A Franciscan friary of 1474 on a spit at the mouth of the river, blown up during a siege in 1601, where the Annals of the Four Masters were written down in the 1630s. It is a roofless ruin in a graveyard reached on foot from the Diamond.
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Harvey's Point
A lakeside hotel on Lough Eske run by a Swiss family from 1989, low buildings on the water with the Bluestacks behind and rooms facing the lake. It is a long-standing fixture of the north-west, and the dining room takes non-residents by booking.
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Lough Eske
A lake under the Bluestacks a few kilometres north of the town, ringed by woodland and one of the few Irish waters holding arctic char. A quiet road runs most of the way around it, and the Bluestack Way crosses the ground above the shore.
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Lough Eske Castle
A Tudor Revival castle gutted by fire in 1939, left a shell for sixty years and rebuilt as a hotel opened in 2007, on the lake shore in fifty hectares of woodland. It is the grandest place to sleep in the county.
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Muckross Head
A sandstone headland east of Kilcar with a beach on one side and horizontally bedded cliffs on the other that have made it a rock climbing venue. The strata overhang so far that the routes climb out over the sea.
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Slieve League
Sea cliffs reaching six hundred and one metres, among the highest in Europe, with a viewing platform at Bunglass and a ridge called One Man's Pass running out along the top. The upper car park is behind a gate and the ridge is exposed with drops on both sides.
