One remembers Donegal was not conquered by the English until the Seventeenth Century and by the 1920's the English had still not eradicated rural Donegal's Celtic inheritance. Our enjoyable visit to Derry behind us, we crossed seamlessly into the Irish Republic without bothersome border posts or checkpoints to impair our sense of well-being. The county is dotted with castles, cairns, monasteries and country-house hotels. Travelling the country roads you'll have a feeling you've escaped, at last, from all the world's hurry and hassle. After overnighting at the elegant Castle Grove Hotel, Ballymaleel, resisting another Irish breakfast, we headed for Sligo, historically a battleground for Vikings, Anglo-Normans and Oliver Cromwell, whose Puritans slaughtered and laid waste entire families throwing them from their ancestral lands, replacing them with his English officers.
History is very much alive here.
Anglo-Irish names resonate in these parts. Parkes, Villiers, Strongbow, the Gore-Booths, one of whom became Countess Constance Markievicz and played a leading role in the 1916 Easter Rising against the Brits, and Sir Frederick Hamilton, founder of Manorhamilton. Once a modest little market town, when I lived there in the late Fifties, with unpretentious villages around the corner, today Sligo has traffic jams, housing estates, supermarkets, upscale restaurants and urban sprawl, although you still may find a few white-washed thatched cottages with scarlet doors on the outskirts. But the city's main claim to fame is a son of Sligo, William Butler Yeats, and pilgrims arrive from all over the world to pay homage at the poet's unpretentious grave in Drumcliff churchyard, where he lies with his wife Georgie, set in the grounds of a plain and simple Protestant church. My favourite poem is The Lake Isle of Inisfree and there is an actual Lake Isle, a small tree-covered island, which is a very popular tourist spot.