Donegal Castle and the Diamond: the two-hour history of Donegal Town

Donegal Town looks the way it does because of two building projects four centuries apart from each other, and understanding both is the fastest way to make sense of the place in an afternoon. The first is Donegal Castle, built at the water's edge by the O'Donnell clan around 1474. The second is the Diamond, the pedestrian square laid out after the O'Donnells lost the castle, and the two sit a five-minute walk apart, so a short circuit between them covers most of the town's history in about two hours.

The O'Donnells and the castle

For more than two centuries the O'Donnell clan ran a large part of Ulster from Donegal Castle, using it as a base to deal directly with Spanish, French and papal contacts and earning a continental reputation as maritime traders. The castle you can visit today is not quite the O'Donnells' building, though. After the Flight of the Earls in 1607, when the Gaelic lords left Ireland for the continent, the castle passed to Sir Basil Brooke, who added a Jacobean manor house onto the O'Donnell tower and commissioned an ornate chimney-piece for it. What survives is really two buildings in one: the older O'Donnell tower house and Brooke's plantation-era addition, standing together at the same site.

The castle deteriorated over the following centuries and was restored by the Office of Public Works in the 1990s. It is now open to visitors, with a spiral stairwell, a wooden-roofed hall, bay windows and information panels covering the O'Donnell and Brooke eras in turn. Give it around 45 minutes to an hour, and check current opening hours and admission prices before you go, since these change.

Brooke's town and the Diamond

Brooke did not stop at the castle. He also laid out Donegal as a formal plantation market town, with the Diamond at its centre, the same pattern used in other Ulster plantation towns like Clones and Enniskillen: a market place with the main streets converging on a central square. Walk the Diamond today and you are walking the shape Brooke gave the town in the early seventeenth century, largely unchanged since.

The Four Masters monument

At the centre of the Diamond stands a freestanding sandstone obelisk, erected in 1934 and unveiled in 1938 by the Bishop of Raphoe. It commemorates four Franciscan scholars, Micheal O Cleirigh, Cu Choigcriche O Cleirigh, Cu Choigcriche O Duibhgeannain and Fearfeasa O Maolchonaire, who worked in the ruins of Donegal Abbey down by the harbour between 1632 and 1636, compiling what became the Annals of the Four Masters. It remains one of the most-cited chronicles of early and medieval Irish history, and it is worth knowing the monument commemorates the writers of a specific book, not a general idea of Irish heritage. Each of the four scholars is named on the obelisk's base, so take a minute to read them individually rather than walking past.

The friary ruins where the work was actually done still stand on the harbour shore, a short walk from the Diamond and freely accessible. Donegal Abbey is quieter and less visited than the castle, and pairing the two, the monument on the Diamond and the ruins where the scholars actually worked, gives the story a physical location rather than leaving it as a plaque you read and move past.

Putting the two together

A sensible order for a first visit: start at the Diamond and read the Four Masters obelisk, since it sets up the history before you see the sites that produced it. Walk five minutes to Donegal Castle and take the OPW's exhibitions at your own pace, understanding it as two buildings in one, the O'Donnell tower and Brooke's addition. Then, if time allows, walk on to the Abbey ruins on the harbour shore to see where the Annals were actually written. The whole circuit, done unhurried, takes around two hours and covers the two building projects, roughly a century and a half apart, that between them explain why Donegal Town has a castle, a square and a monument in the places it does.

Along the way, the shopfronts around the Diamond, particularly Magee 1866 on the corner, are a reminder that the town has kept working through all of this: Brooke's market square is still a market square, just one that now sells tweed rather than cattle.