Dining in Donegal

Chapter 32

Chasing the Dead: Amateur Adventures in Genealogy

Having paid insufficient attention to our culinary arrangements beyond breakfasts in Monaghan, we were determined to avoid that mistake in Donegal. Before we left the North, John steered us to a supermarket so enormous that it seemed built for Finn MacCool, Brian Boru, and some vanished race of Irish giants. Entering the parking lot was more like queuing for a football game than a trip to the grocery. Once inside, we were confronted by checkouts that stretched on like pickets on a hostile border. Crossing them constituted consent to be in a danger zone.

However, the reward was substantial. The aisles, which stretched together could have matched a marathon course, were stuffed and stacked with tantalizing foods. The choices wearied me almost instantly. Consequently, since we each decided to shop on our own given the peculiarities of our palates (particularly mine), we bought far too much in the way of biscuits, cereal, cheeses, and wine. Looking over our bursting bags sparked the guilty realization that we had exceeded even the maximum daily requirement for big Elliott men.

Perhaps genetically we are destined to lay siege to such emporia of eats as this super supermarket. Is the way in these assaults that we take captive of huge numbers of carbohydrates erupt from our Irish warrior heritage? Is this what evolution did to the descendants of the Fianna? One problem with that overly convenient theory is that in the surviving photographs of ancestors going back to the 19th century, our people look pretty thin. One exception is Great Grandma Mary Kenyon who sports a well fed look in her photo. Her father, however, was from Manchester, England. That means like many other things in Irish life our bulk can be blamed on the English.

Doubling down on this formidable provisioning, I started to research restaurants on my Blackberry as we continued in the BMW across the top of Ireland to my Cousin Gerry’s house in Falcarragh. Sturdily unaffected by the cognitive dissonance of undertaking such a task while the boot of the car was stuffed with all sorts of groceries, I endeavored to find inns and cafés where the fare would differ from the stolid comestibles of Monaghan restaurants. This mission engrossed me so thoroughly that the border between UK territory and the Republic passed without notice. Realization that we were in the Republic only happened on seeing the Derryveagh Mountains loom against a cerulean sky. Looking up from ratings of fish houses near Portnablagh and hotel banquets in Gortahork, County Donegal was already hovering over me. Donegal has this habit of peering down at the inhabitants of a car no matter what angle the vehicle has attained. In Monaghan, we seemed on top of sites like Elliott Flats or the graveyards. In Donegal, the world seemed on top of us even when a mountain or cliff was miles away.

Derryveagh Mountains of Donegal and The Poisoned Glen Photo Credit: Seighean https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45613038

The prospect of The Seven Sisters, that chain of mountain peaks in northwest County Donegal, Ireland, sashaying out at us from around a curve made me feel contained, not oppressed or hemmed. Donegal is open to me, well known but without obligations now unlike during my first visit in 1982. I feel quite free there. The landscape’s effect is like that of a fond embrace from a friend. The traveler is like a child carried in a sling by his mother, facing out, unaware after a while that he is unalone, even melting into the breathing life that is always at his back. I like Donegal for the bigness of its smallness, for the depth of its green folds and the shimmer of its gray edges. The sea and mountains, the hidden shores and strands: they formed a kind of home in my head because they had been my mother’s home for a time. I like Donegal because there I am sure to be reminded of my mother.

No matter what eating establishment I do eventually pick (and we will eat out despite all those boxes of cookies and crackers just purchased), the women there will look like my mother; some a little, some a lot. They will touch their swept back hair as she would. If they are old enough, they’ll be sporting the fanciful blues and silver tones that she adopted as part of her hairstyle in her sixties before she gracefully surrendered to the true ghost white color that surged out of her. These women will turn their heads as she did mixing elegance and spirit with their high cheekbones sharp below their glances and above their phrases, which will likely also be sharp. Dining in Donegal, I can kid myself that my mother may walk into the room next and spoof us for our worries at her absence. In that delusion of mine, she will disparage others for their lack of deference and turning on a dime then smile at a child or a painting or these mountains that never seem to disappear. And she will talk with us into the night. Dining in Donegal, driving in Donegal, just sitting in Donegal made her seem close again, which was very much worth that very long ride.

The Girl from Donegal

“In speaking of the north of Ireland, I ought to except the County of Donegal, the inhabitants of which differ materially in character and circumstances from those of the other northern counties, and approximate more nearly to those of the extreme west and south. Small holdings, and minute subdivisions of land, prevail in Donegal to a greater extent than I have found in any other part of Ireland; and the consequent growth of population has been there so great, as to press hard upon the productive powers of the soil, and to depress the condition of the people to nearly the lowest point in the social scale, exposing them, under the not infrequent contingency of an unfavorable season, or a partial failure of the potato crop, to the most dreadful privatizations.” The Poor Laws of Ireland by Sir George Nicholls, 1838

The note above is not the first written reference to my mother’s part of Donegal. That honor goes to an account made by the secretary for the local Anglican Bishop earlier in the 19th century. With the sweat of fear still dripping heavy on the paper, he wrote of his experience of being chased from Falcarragh by a mob of men as he attempted to collect the standard fees due the Church of Ireland Under the English laws of that time. Visitors should not infer that pastoral landscapes contain passive people. David Dickson in his introduction to Hugh Dorian’s memoir of social life in 19th-century Donegal tags one of the characteristics of that land as possessing “ a deep antipathy to outside order “. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I like Donegal so much: its defiant harshness adds to its exquisiteness.

A visitor should also not assume that all of Donegal is the same. Perhaps even more than the rest of Ireland, the county is a place of particularities. When I first came to Ireland in 1982, a curious visitor could still learn of each village having its own ghosts and demons, of each hamlet with a place name being a little varied from the next crossroads or clog of houses. In my lifetime, each parish still had its own legends nested within the larger legends of the land. Those differences, those peculiarities, may be submerged under the deluge of modernity, but the distinctions still deserve consideration. In a remote corner like this where good roads came late if at all separateness was defined by the walking distance between each place. A walk that will only last a morning from Ballyconnell to Carrowcannon through the intersection at Falcarragh onto Moyra and ending up in Dunmore may not reveal the myriad differences that used to mark the people of each of those spots, but it still betrays family networks that are not easily breached even by someone who lives just over the next hill. The tribes of these different places in centuries past might mingle on fair days, extraordinary feast processions, or political — legal gatherings, but the power of that mingling arose in part from the separateness of those groups. Even a short physical distance could betray a wide cultural gap.

Things can get funky in Donegal

As Frank Sweeney noted in his monograph on the 1898 murder of Conell Boyle, the distances that had to be covered by foot or in a cart also enforced in Donegal a society resistant to change. Distances, however small, created the “ local cradle of revered heritage, plan, clan and family rights and customs, oral tradition and unwritten law, justice by the enforcement of community mentality and acceptance, through loyalty, of the mores and codes of its people and their tradition…. Preserving one’s status, dignity and name meant keeping strictly within the conventions and in positions of one’s equals. Disturbing accepted practice engendered conflict with family, kin and neighbors. Unorthodoxy, intelligence and innovation were frowned upon. Nothing should occur to disturb the equilibrium of local society.”

Such distinctiveness and immunity to change may be pulverized eventually ― if they haven’t been already ― by the extreme atmospheric pressure imposed by the digital world. The endless cloud that covers all of us endeavors eventually to render every corner of the world with a sameness of appearance and thought, but Donegal is not quite swallowed yet by that settled sameness of brands, by what George W.S. Trow called ‘ the context of no context’.

This hardiness should not cause newcomers to romanticize Donegal. Looked at from the perspective of comfort and progress, Donegal might seem like a place best appreciated from a rearview mirror, a place to leave. For those who stayed, their fate was often cold and barren. This was true during the time of the famine in the 1840s where in the town bordering my mother’s village, Dunfanaghy, John Kelly in The Graves Are Walking documents that “ more than half the population was ‘living on a single meal of cabbage.’” This harshness was evident in another way over 100 years later in 1961, when according to a couple of Princeton professors who studied European fertility “ Donegal’s nuptiality rate was the lowest in Europe “. It’s a tough place. No wonder that the ancients here measured a person’s age by how many winters they had survived.

But like a landscape from Tolkien, magic lurks beneath and within the brutal rocks and hard soil. Brian Friel in his play and later movie adaptation of Dancing at Lughnasa conveyed to the world this place still close to the currents of myth, to the spirits of the season. He had in mind the villages like Falcarragh dotting the west of the county as locales that could still evidence magic. Lughnasa is only one of the festivals that rise from the rhythms of that land. The Midsummer celebration, Oiche Fheile Eoin (or what the priests in another clever grab also made St. John’s Eve), Samhain (Halloween), Bealtaine and others all emanate from the slow turns of sun and land that made the years go around in this cut off corner of the world. Friel captured the odd mix of repressiveness and vibrancy there from the vantage of the 1940s, but even now visitors may spy certain elements.

Our view of Oiche Fheile Eoin, St. John’s Eve bonfires in 2005

When I took my whole family along with my sister Irene and niece Alanna to Donegal, we stayed the first night in an inn on Bloody Foreland, a headland astride the North Atlantic that drips dramatically with the light of both sunrise and sunset. We had lucked into arriving just hours before ‘ Oiche Fheile Eoin’. Our inn was near the top of the hill and we had the whole sweep of the strand in front of us with views stretching a few miles to either side. On that night, people all over that land lit bonfires. I am told that in Irish these are called — tine cnamh — meaning fire of bones. And some say that long ago ‘the bones’ were not just a metaphor; the ashes of the dead (animals? people? unclear) would be spread the next morning over the fields as a fertility ceremony. And there we were in the early 21st century, observers to a rite from prehistory celebrating the Celtic goddess Aine.

Whether the people around those fires on this night leapt through them for luck or called down the goddess’s blessing on their crops as once was the custom, we had no idea. Even if the celebration had lost those meanings, the eruption of bonfires all about the circled horizon struck a certain strength and majesty into the night. We surrendered to its power with our own dances and shouts. We did not expect that the goddess of love, the fairy Queen of Munster, was heeding us as we toasted the longest day of the year with pints of Guinness from the pub next door. But we did get caught up in the rush of emotion and imagined that those monstrous rocks — batholiths and tors — had come alive for this evening. Donegal seemed suffused with spirit that could not just be explained by our energy.

The fire was in their eyes that night in 2005

However, in the morning when we wished to speak about it with various cousins most of them preferred not to dwell upon the old practice or our experience. They only smiled and clucked as if those things were unworthy of significant attention. Did they think us silly or naïve to dip into this other world, to bathe in those eddies of mysticism that abound in Donegal? Or were they embarrassed to admit to the endurance of such belief amidst the satellite dishes stationed by caravans, the Chinese takeout joints, and still standing billboards for ghost towns of holiday homes? Or are they like so many locals just mildly pissed off at each wave of Yanks co-opting the rites of their pagan night? Perhaps such sentimentality is just unattractive to the actual inhabitants and marked us as outsiders.

We raised a toast to the tine cnamh, the fire of the bones

For Falcarragh, like much of Donegal as the quote at the beginning of this chapter attests, is a hard place — literally. However occasional visitors like us feel about it this is the constant reality for those who live there. Wherever we walked or looked we saw rock; in the dramatic outcroppings that thrust to the sea, in immovable boulders still sitting in the fields, in the boundary walls that gave the town its name, and up in the mountains that are the highest in Ireland where the sheep ramble until they disappear into the clouds. This is a beautiful but not easy place to live.

In the testimony of Charles McGlinchey captured in his narrative, The Last of the Name, the whole industry of his parish in a nearby section of Donegal was lint, the northern name for flax. There as in Monaghan there were early 19th century ‘scutch-Mills’, where the lint was turned into fabric. My guess is that Falcarragh didn’t even boast that primitive enterprise because it was too far away from the more industrial section in Ulster. Life in this village depended upon more common crops like potatoes and cabbage along with work for the local landlord. The limits of this existence and its infamous variability meant that there also had to be ‘letting out’ of the younger members of the family to farmers over the Mourne Valley, about 40 miles to the east. Hence, the phrase Irish writers like Friel Benedict Kiely, and Thomas Flanagan remembered hearing from parents and grandparents, ‘ the poor Donegals’, to describe the migrant or indentured farm help from these precincts, who roamed at harvest to the richer Ulster and Scottish valleys. Living in Donegal meant making a living with hard work whether fishing in a fierce and tricky ocean, or tilling land filled with stone.

That reality led to a paradox in our genealogical investigations. This very trait of being tough survivors was part of our motivation to proudly pursue these ancestors. However, lives of subsistence made tracing such a segment of the population much harder. The evidence of existence goes out with the tide, disappears beneath the seasons. What we did enjoy in this spot that was not present in Monaghan was that Falcarragh held our strongest links to the Isle. Our mother had left this village for the states. Except for those Connaghans at our recent luncheon in Lurgan, our other first cousins, uncles, and aunts had stayed mostly rooted here. The names that we saw on signs — Falcarragh, Dunmore, Carrowcannon — echoed our earliest memories. In this country, we could actually see family farmhouses of the Sweeneys that still stood. That was more evocative for my purposes than a pile of rocks and a barren flat. There were cottages where our mother had lived for a few years between immigrant existences in Scotland, London, and finally New York where she became a USA citizen. The existence of our people in these places meant that we might pick up that backwards leading trail to our current quarry, those maternal grandparents that none of us had met, Hannah Sweeney and Conn Connaghan.

But…that chapter will arrive a little later than usual because our play, RETROSPECTIVE, is about to open in London on May 14th at Barons Court Theatre. A journal of that experience will form over at Testing; A Personal History. Check it out starting Monday May 11.

Grandparents never met: Hannah and Conn

Originally published at https://chasingthedead.blog on May 9, 2026.