Things to do
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Viewpoint
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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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.
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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.
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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.