Discover Letterkenny

The town Donegal actually runs on

Letterkenny takes its name from the Irish Leitir Ceanainn, the hillside of the O'Cannons, after the chieftain family who once held the land. It grew as a Plantation-era market town in the early seventeenth century, and Wolfe Tone was arrested at a hotel here in 1798 after the failed French landing at Rutland Island, a footnote most visitors never hear about. The town's real growth came much later: Letterkenny only became a byword for Donegal itself in the last sixty years, as the county's civil service jobs, its university campus and its regional hospital all landed here rather than in Donegal Town or Ballyshannon.

That history explains the shape of the place today. Letterkenny doesn't have a harbour or a beach to build a postcard around; it has a long Main Street that climbs the hill from the River Swilly, a cathedral finished in 1901 that is still the only Catholic cathedral in the county, and a Cathedral Quarter of narrow lanes behind it that host the town's street festivals. It is Donegal's commercial and cultural capital in every sense but the official one, and it makes no apology for being a working town first and a tourist stop second.