Donegal, Ireland—a Land of Myth and Music

14.10.2024 - 20:49 / cntraveler.com

On my first morning in Donegal, a place sometimes referred to as Ireland's forgotten county, a man named Séamus Doohan drove a friend and me down a twisting ribbon of road in a van filled with electrical equipment. Although the county is one of the most beautiful in Ireland, it doesn't attract many tourists, so Doohan also works as an electrician. It was a bright, clear day, which isn't often the case in this part of the country, known for its beautiful mountains and the mists that often conceal them. We left the van and hiked up a windswept hillside, turning now and then to look at the glittering Atlantic below. There were no trees to obstruct our view. Like most of the region, the hill was covered in bog, a great green carpet of moss and grass speckled with flowers that Doohan named in Irish, which he said was the only language he spoke until he was five.

A view of the sea from Teac Campbell Guesthouse, a cheery family-run inn in Bunbeg

Artist Deirdre Brennan paints in her garden at Cluain na dTor.

About halfway up the hill, Doohan began telling us about the ancient people who gave the flowers their names. He said they placed the bodies of their kings in tombs that may have been meant to serve as portals to the Otherworld, a realm just beyond our own. Those people, the Gaels, once ruled all of Ireland, the Isle of Man, and parts of Scotland. Ireland's culture was a Gaelic culture, its language a Gaelic language, its laws Gaelic laws. But in the 12th century invaders arrived from the larger island to the east, marking the beginning of 800 years of English domination. Laying the foundation of an empire that would one day span the globe, England outlawed Catholicism (which by that point had replaced the ancient Druidic order) and took steps to eradicate the Gaelic language. As Sir John Davies, the attorney general for Ireland, wrote in 1612, “We may conceive and hope that the next generation will in tongue and heart and every way else become English.”

Where the heart was concerned, the invaders were unsuccessful. The tongue was another matter. Only 1 percent of Irish people speak Irish as a first language. Nearly all who do live on the western fringe of Ireland, in the Gaeltacht, a collection of areas where Irish is officially recognized as the language of the home. The Donegal Gaeltacht consists of three parishes. One, Gaoth Dobhair (Gweedore in English), is home to more Irish speakers—about 3,700—than any other in the country. Not coincidentally, perhaps, it is also among the poorest of Ireland's 2,500 parishes. Located in the northwest corner of Ireland, Donegal has long been isolated, in many ways, from the rest of the island. This has been something of a mixed blessing. On one hand, the region has