County Donegal

“ About 78% of the population is Roman Catholic, and almost the whole is rural. The native Erse naturally dies out slowly in this remote county, and the Donegal dialect is said to be the purest in the Irish language. The towns are small in extent and importance. Lifford (pop. 446) , the county town, is practically a suburb of Strabane, in the neighbouring Co. Tyrone. Ballyshannon (2359) on the river Erne, Letterkenny (2370) at the head of Lough Swilly, and Donegal (1214) at the head of the bay of that name, are the other principal towns. ”

“ Donegal contains seven baronies and fifty parishes. Assizes are held at Lifford, and quarter sessions at Ballyshannon, Buncrana, Donegal, Cardonagh, Glenties, Letterkenny and Lifford. The county is in the Protestant dioceses of Clogher and Derry, 414 and the Roman Catholic dioceses of Raphoe, Clogher and Derry. The county returned twelve members to the Irish parliament ”

“ Moving thus, day by day, taking practically any road that presented itself, they had wandered easily through rugged, beautiful Donegal down into Connaught. They had camped on the slopes of rough mountains, slept peacefully in deep valleys that wound round and round like a corkscrew, traversed for weeks in Connemara by the clamorous sea where they lived sumptuously on fish, and then they struck to the inland plains again, and away by curving paths to the County Kerry. ”

“ Coleraine is where you join the train to get to Derry, and the rail skirts the shore of Lough Foyle—easternmost of the great succession of sea loughs [Pg 29] which make the distinctive beauty of Donegal. Inishowen, its western shore, is included in that county by English geography, though this peninsula never formed part of Tyrconnell. Its lordship was always disputed between O'Neill and O'Donnell, and the best evidence of its separateness is given by the ecclesiastical boundary, which here, as always, follows the old tribal demarcation. ”

“ The capital of the government is Novo-cherkassk. Many of the Cossack stanitsas (villages) are very populous.
(P. A. K.; J. T. Be.)
DONEGAL, a county in the extreme north-west of Ireland, in the province of Ulster, bounded N. and W. by the Atlantic Ocean, E. by Lough Foyle and the counties Londonderry and Tyrone, and S. by Donegal Bay and the counties Fermanagh and Leitrim. The area is 1,197,153 acres, or about 1871 sq. m., the county being the largest in Ireland after Cork and Mayo. This portion of the country possesses little natural wealth ”

“ The peninsula of Inishowen also received its name from him. Tyrconnell, the territory of Conall, extended over County Donegal. Between these races, bound together as they were by common descent and frequent intermarriages, [55] wars were of constant occurrence through many generations.
DONEGAL CASTLE
The Cathach of the O'Donnells is a cumhdach, or box, made, as its inscription says, by Cathbhar O'Donnell towards the end of the eleventh century. It contains a portion of the Psalms in Latin, said to have been written by St. ”

“ First, I would transport the reader in imagination to a lonely valley in the far west of the county of Donegal. The morning light is sparkling in diamonds from the dewdrops that cluster on the bent and heather, and is throwing a rainbow sheen [Pg 59] across each web of gossamer that hangs across our path as we climb the long rough slope in front. Around are bare bleak moorlands, too high and infertile for cultivation, from the sides and hollows of which the peasants dig their fuel. The signs of human occupation grow fewer and fainter as we ascend. ”

“ Although Donegal is in the Ulster division of the kingdom, in the famine time it partook more of the character of a Connaught than an Ulster county. A gentleman was deputed by the Society of Friends to explore it, who has given his views upon the Irish Famine with a spirit and feeling which do him honour as a man and a Christian. Writing from Stranorlar he says: "This county, like most others in Ireland, belongs to a few large proprietors, some of them, unhappily, absentees, whose large domains sometimes extend over whole parishes and baronies, and contain a population of 8,000 to 12,000. ”

“ This district consists of the province of Connaught, the counties of Donegal, Kerry, and Clare, and the districts of Bantry, Castletown, Schull, and Skibbereen in the County of Cork. The land in those localities is very poor and is estimated at an average of eighty cents an acre, while farm lands in the rest of Ireland have an average value of $3.12 an acre. The majority of the people live on small plots, where they manage to raise a few potatoes and cabbages and keep a few cows, goats, pigs, and sheep of worn-out breeds, which they drive wherever they can find pasturage. ”

“ The Scotch Irish and the Welsh came to Lancaster County in the second decade of the 18th century, and brought with them the tenets of the Presbyterian church. The Rev. David Evans founded the Upper Octorara Church in 1720 and was at Donegal in the same year. For twenty years the immigration from Ulster averaged 20,000 a year. Donegal in Lancaster County became one of the strong seats of Presbyterianism in America. The Donegal Church became a center of patriotic endeavor, both in the French and Indian War and in the American Revolution. Its story is unique in American church history. ”

“ Under the Land Act of 1891 was created the Congested Districts Board, with an annual income of £55,000, for the purpose of promoting the permanent improvement of the backward districts of the West. The districts which come under its control are those which answer the following test, that more than twenty per cent. of the population of a county live in electoral divisions, of which the total rateable value gives a sum of less than 30s. per head of population. Such electoral divisions occur in the nine counties of Kerry, Cork, Galway, Mayo, Clare, Roscommon, Leitrim, Sligo, Donegal. ”

“ In Donegal, as in other counties of Ulster, the linen manufacture affords employment to a number of inhabitants, especially at Raphoe, while the manufacture of excellent homespun, woollen stockings and worked muslin is carried on pretty extensively. The trade in these manufactures and in the domestic produce of the county finds its principal outlets through the port of Londonderry and the inland town of Strabane, Co. ”

“ By law the present counties of Derry, Donegal, Tyrone, and Armagh were, except for the Church lands, practically owned in fee simple by five individuals, viz., the earls of Tirconnell and Tyrone, O'Dogherty, O'Hanlon, and O'Neill of the Fews. [7] In these four counties then. Royal grants together with the greed of the chiefs had combined to deprive the clansmen of all legal titles to land. Rory O'Donnell had no sooner obtained a grant in general terms of Tirconnell than he induced all his subject chiefs to make surrenders to him, and to acknowledge him as owner in fee of the whole county. ”

“ For some distance it is by no means easy to scale this declivity.
Towards the southern verge of the county the coast is low and flat, but the bold precipitous face of Ben Bulben looks highly attractive.
Before leaving Donegal it will be well to mention one useful hint. The Ordnance maps of this county show 100-ft. contours, which are of the utmost advantage upon any excursion, as the height of any point attained by the pedestrian may be fixed within a hundred feet. Very few other parts of Ireland are thus favoured. [Pg 155]
The Ben Bulben Range lies in the northern part of Sligo and Leitrim ”

“ He thought it was an under-statement for this part of the county of Donegal, but to be explained, perhaps, by the fact that so much of the migration is merely from one county into another, and not out of the kingdom. He agreed that the practice goes on upon a much more extensive scale in the County Mayo, where more than thirteen per cent, of all the adult male population are said to belong to the category of migratory labourers. ”

“ The branches of the Foyle which rise in Donegal are the Derg, issuing from Lough Derg, and the Finn, rising in the beautiful little lake of the same name in the highlands, and passing through some of the best cultivated land in the county. The Foyle, augmented by their contributions, and by those of several other branches from the counties Tyrone and Londonderry, proceeds northward, discharging its waters into the southern extremity of Lough Foyle, at the city of Londonderry. It is navigable for vessels of large burden to this place, and thence by lighters of fifty tons as far as Lifford. ”

“ Donegal was an old town on the east side of the Susquehanna, situated between the Conewago and Chiques creeks, in the northwestern angle of the county of Lancaster (Scull’s Map of Pennsylvania) , where these Indians have left their name to the Conoy, or as it is now called, Coney Creek. Memoirs of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, iv, part ii, p. 210. The Conoys were originally from Piscataway, in Maryland, whence they moved to an island in the Potomac, and, on the invitation of William Penn, removed to the Susquehanna— (Pennsylvania Colonial Records, iv, p. 657) .—E. B. O’Callaghan. ”

“ On hearing of the Spanish descent he at once raised the siege of Donegal, and, accompanied by Brian Oge O’Rourke, MacDermot, and others, including some Munster exiles, marched from Ballymote through Roscommon and Galway to Shannon Harbour, where he was ferried across, and through Westmeath and King’s County into Tipperary. ”

“ Before eight years had elapsed we find that the tenants had been compelled to surrender their leases and take out new ones “on increased rents, by means whereof the revenues were well increased, to the honour of Almighty God.” Occasionally a native appears with 1,000 acres opposite his name, but it is pretty rare. For example, “Only forty natives in the whole extensive County of Donegal obtained small grants in the dreary regions 48of Doe and Fanet, now Kilmacrenan. Several of them were representatives of noble Irish families, and the remainder belonged to the class of native gentry. ”

“ On the 5th of November they write that the rebels had seized the houses and estates of almost all the English in Monaghan, Cavan, Fermanagh, Armagh, Tyrone, Donegal, Leitrim, Longford, and a great part of Down, and were beginning to threaten the English plantations in the King’s County and Queen’s County, that Dundalk had surrendered to them without a blow, and that they were marching on Drogheda. ”

“ This family is famous in the annals both of Scotland and Ireland. We find Rev. Jas. Wallace, pastor Presbyterian Church Urney, Co. Donegal 1654-74, and James Wallace, elder in Donaughmore, Co., Donegal, 1672-1700.
James Wallace, doubtless of the Donegal family, settled in Augusta county 1748; mar. Elizabeth daughter of John Campbell and Elizabeth Walker, He died 1780. It seems that he had but one son, viz
William Wallace, who m. Jane, dau. or John Hunter and who died intestate, 1779. Five children viz:
James, William, Samuel, Frances and Mary. ”

“ Interminable red bog. A cluster of hovels on the tableland; one set this way, another that, huddling together for company sake, it seems, in this abomination of desolation. A drift of young children play about on a green cleared space between the holdings. (In Donegal one sees young children everywhere.) They run off like wild-cats at our approach, screaming loudly and chattering in Irish as they run. A rick of turf, thatched with winter-stales ”

“ We pass numbers of houses on the way, each with a group of gaily-dressed peasants sunning themselves at the door. The ascent is gradual at first, but as we go on it gets steeper, and after a while’s climbing we begin to feel the sense of elevation and detachment. The air is delightfully warm, and the fragrance of sea and bracken and ling is in our hearts. In time we reach Carrigan Head, with its martello tower, seven hundred feet odd over the Atlantic. Southwards the blue waters of Donegal Bay spread themselves, with just the slightest ripple on their surface, glinting in the warm sunlight. ”

“ The Marquess of Conyngham, whom I met at Strabane, said:—"The people of Donegal are pleasant, kind, and civil. Taking them all round, they are much more energetic than the Southerners, and we were making fair progress until these Home Rule Bills were brought in. The country was being opened up, and things were beginning to improve, when the bill came and blighted everything. Now the people are growing idle and discontented. They are all right when left alone. Everybody likes the Donegal peasants, and they deserve to be liked. ”

“ There is a lack of fuel, which has to be supplied from the main-land. The inhabitants have paid no rents since the loss of the Wasp, which was sent to enforce payment or evict the tenants. St. Columba, the patron saint of the place, is reported to have landed here in a curragh.
From Fallcarragh you get a fine view of Muckish, with its twenty-two hundred [39] feet of altitude. While not the highest mountain in the Donegal highlands, Muckish is longer and of greater bulk than any of its rivals, and is also more imposing. Its name in Irish means "a pig's back," which it very much resembles. ”

“ The Companies of Skinners, Fishmongers, Haberdashers, Vintners and the like thereupon became Absentee Proprietors, and have guzzled Irish rents in city feasts and holiday excursions to Ireland from that day to this. Six counties in Ulster were confiscated, and not merely the chiefs, but the entire population dispossessed. The fruitful plains of Armagh, the deep pastoral glens that lie between the sheltering hills of Donegal, the undulating meadow lands stretching by the noble lakes and rivers of Fermanagh, passed from the race which had possessed them since before the redemption of mankind. ”