ON TOUR – Donegal

With names like Murder Hole Beach, Poison Glen and Bad Eddie’s Shipwreck, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a visit to Donegal is a death-defying experience! Well, we didn’t make it to check out Bad Eddie’s wreck but can testify that Murder Hole Beach and the Poison Glen are two of the most serene and beautiful places you can visit.

Perhaps the locals have a penchant for the sinister or – and this is my theory – they’re trying to dissuade people from coming, so they can keep their patch of paradise all to themselves! If that’s the plan, it looks like they’ll have to try harder. Donegal’s stunning and dramatic scenery makes it is a top destination for many travellers and it has been named number 1 on the National Geographic Traveller (UK) Cool List for 2017, so that’s probably not going to stop any time soon.

We had a long line of must-see spots on our list for Donegal and in the end we settled for about half of them, while also adding some new ones for next time too! It’s a large county and thanks to the narrow winding roads, some locations take longer to reach than you would think when looking at the map. So in the end, we decided it was best to relax and enjoy the spots we did get to, instead of trying to squeeze in too much this time around.

We still managed to pack in a lot in our 3 days and we were so, so lucky to get to photograph the Northern Lights on our first night there! Seeing the Northern Lights has been a bucket-list item of mine for a long time and I had hoped to visit Iceland this April but that didn’t work out. So imagine my excitement as we were driving to Donegal and the conditions were looking good for the aurora. We headed out to Fanad Lighthouse and as you can see from the pics below, we got lucky!! It was amazing to see those colours appear on the back of the camera after a long exposure but unfortunately the aurora was not strong enough to be seen by the naked eye, so I’ll still have to forge ahead with that trip to Iceland at some stage. Shame!

Here’s a list of the places we made it to and images below:

– Slieve League Cliffs
– Fanad Head Lighthouse for the Northern Lights!
– Glenveagh Castle
– Mt Errigal – right to the summit!
– Poison Glen
– Murder Hole Beach – Boyeeghter Bay
– Grianán of Aileach stone ringfort
– Buncrana

Click on images to enlarge