Discover Donegal Town

A plantation market town at the head of Donegal Bay

Donegal Town grew up around the Diamond, the pedestrian square at the centre of the Ulster plantation town Sir Basil Brooke laid out after the Flight of the Earls in 1607, replacing the O'Donnell clan's earlier stronghold with a formal market town. Donegal Castle still stands at the water's edge where the O'Donnells built it around 1474, restored by the OPW and open to visitors, and the Diamond itself carries a 1934 obelisk to the Four Masters, the four Franciscan scholars who compiled their history of Ireland in the ruined Abbey down by the harbour between 1632 and 1636. The town's Irish name, Dun na nGall, fort of the foreigners, points back further still, to the Viking traders recorded in Donegal Bay from the ninth century.

Donegal Town also does practical work for anyone touring the north-west: it is the road junction where the N15 to Sligo and Derry meets the N56, the coast road that runs out toward Killybegs, Kilcar and Slieve League. That gateway function, combined with a genuinely walkable historic core, tweed and craft shopping around Magee 1866 and Donegal Craft Village, and a 75-minute boat tour out onto the bay, makes it a sensible one- or two-night base rather than a drive-through stop.