Expat Travel Mom

This was part of two massive road trips across Ireland and Northern Ireland over two summers, one covering three weeks, and the other six weeks, and well over a thousand miles. If you're planning to follow similar routes, this post covers the wild northwest specifically. The rest of the trips are broken out separately: Northern Ireland, Dublin & the East, The South & West, Connemara & the West, and Wicklow, Wexford & Kildare.

Donegal

The drive alone, from Giant's Causeway across to Donegal, was worth the tank of gas on its own, the coastline rolling from dramatic cliffs into soft green hills the further west we went. There's a little video of that drive if you want a feel for it.

Donegal Castle sits right on the River Eske in the center of Donegal Town, and it comes with one of the more dramatic backstories of any castle we visited on this trip. Built in 1474 by Hugh O'Donnell, chief of the O'Donnell clan, it served as the seat of power for one of Gaelic Ulster's most formidable dynasties, rulers of the old kingdom of Tyrconnell, which once stretched across most of modern Donegal and beyond. The O'Donnells held it for well over a century, until their defeat in the Nine Years' War forced their leaders to flee Ireland entirely in what's known as the Flight of the Earls. Rather than let his family's stronghold fall into English hands, Hugh O'Donnell reportedly burned the castle himself on his way out the door.

It didn't stay in ruins for long. The castle was granted to an English captain, Basil Brooke, who rebuilt it in the early 1600s, adding a Jacobean manor house onto the original medieval tower, which is exactly the mix of styles you can still see standing today, part fortified Gaelic stronghold, part 17th-century English manor, two very different eras of Irish history stitched into the same building. It's a simple, lovely stop, and exactly the kind of unhurried afternoon a long road trip needs built into it every so often.

Slieve League

Ireland kept impressing us the further northwest we drove, and Slieve League might be the single most underrated view in the entire country. These sea cliffs rise nearly 2,000 feet straight out of the Atlantic, nearly three times the height of the much more famous Cliffs of Moher, and yet a fraction of the crowds show up here. Standing at the viewing point with the wind hitting us and the ocean churning below genuinely felt like standing at the edge of the world.

Glencolmcille

Just down the road, Glencolmcille felt like stepping straight into another century. The Folk Village here is a cluster of small, whitewashed, thatched-roof cottages called a clachan, each one a faithful replica of how people actually lived in this exact region across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. A local priest, Father James McDyer, built the whole thing in 1967 to help preserve the area's heritage and give the local economy a boost after years of emigration had hollowed the region out. Walking between the cottages, thatched roofs tied down against the wild Atlantic winds with rope and pegs, half-doors designed to keep the animals out and the people in, felt less like a museum and more like the past was simply still there, waiting for us to wander through it.

While up in this area, we chose this Airbnb as our home base. Between a 5,000-year-old tomb, cliffs that put the famous ones to shame, and a village frozen in time, this stretch of the trip might have been the most purely magical few days of the entire three weeks. Donegal and the Northwest doesn't get talked about nearly as much as the more famous stretches of Ireland, and honestly, that's exactly what made this leg of the trip feel like ours.

These were our two big road trips through Ireland and Northern Ireland.