The Case in Brief
The Fortress an O’Donnell Chieftain Burned Rather Than Lose Donegal Castle is located at the heart of the town, a squat grey tower dominating…
The Fortress an O’Donnell Chieftain Burned Rather Than Lose
Donegal Castle is located at the heart of the town, a squat grey tower dominating the curve of the River Eske, close enough to the Diamond to warrant a walk from your morning coffee in the square to the castle’s gatehouse in under five minutes.
It looks less the haunt of a phantom than a determined edifice, a fortress that has been built, held, besieged, deliberately burnt by its own family, rebuilt as an English manor, fought over twice more, and eventually given up to the state as a ruin. The latter is perhaps more significant than it sounds; somewhere in that progression from building to burning by one’s own family lies the story that inspires locals to listen out, on certain nights, for the sound of a voice carried over the water.
A Fort Older Than Its Name
Both the town and the county are called Dun-gall, the Dun being the old Irish word for a fort. The Dùn na nGall is much older than the castle of stone that we are able to visit today. Researchers, who looked into the history of the place in the nineteenth century, were able to trace it back to an earthwork fort on the same site, which was almost certainly built by Norse settlers in the pre–twelfth-century period, since medieval Irish annalists reserved the term Gaill (‘foreigners’) for Viking raiders in this period.
The Annals of Ulster record that this earlier castle was burnt in 1159 by Murtogh MacLoughlin, head of the northern Uí Néill dynasty, three centuries before an O’Donnell would build a stone castle on the site.
The O’Donnells Build a Fortress for Their Descendants
The stone castle itself dates to 1474, built by Hugh Roe O’Donnell, son of Niall Garve O’Donnell and chief of the O’Donnell lordship of Tyrconnell, roughly modern County Donegal. The Annals of the Four Masters record his death in 1505, after a forty-four year reign, and state plainly he was the first to erect a castle here, for a fortress for his posterity; the same annals credit him with founding a Franciscan friary nearby around the same date, where he was buried.
It might help to know who this is, because a significantly more famous O’Donnell shares his first name: Hugh Roe, the castle-builder, died in 1505 – a full century before Red Hugh O’Donnell, the Nine Years’ War commander most people think of when hearing the name, could possibly be born.
The castle became the chief seat of the O’Donnell lords, and it wasn’t long before it became the site of family feuds as well as grand functions. Academic reports on the site mention that by 1564, the annals record both an “old castle” and a “new tower”, at Donegal, and that a succession dispute between rival O’Donnell cousins, Hugh, possessor of the tower at the time, and Con, son of Calvagh and seeking to claim both structures, was fought out here before Con was captured by a rival Ulster lord and the imbroglio passed.
Siege, Fire, and a Chieftain’s Last Stand
The castle’s most dramatic episode involves the Nine Years’ War that saw the Gaelic confederacy rise up in rebellion against the Tudor crown, in particular, in 1601. By this time, Niall Garve O’Donnell, a rival claimant to the O’Donnell chieftainship and a distant cousin of the wartime leader Red Hugh O’Donnell, had already crossed over to the English side.
Sir Henry Docwra, commander of the crown’s forces in nearby Lough Foyle, sent Niall Garve and hundreds of English soldiers to occupy Donegal, where they took up residence in the O’Donnells’ Franciscan friary across from the castle. Red Hugh, returning from campaigning in Connacht, laid siege to them there for all of August and September, cutting off their food and their cattle.
On the morning of September 19, 1601, fire broke out in the friary; whether accidentally or deliberately, the matter was never resolved, and it spread to the garrison’s stock of gunpowder. The explosion killed and wounded dozens of soldiers and destroyed much of their food, money, and supplies; one contemporary Irish chronicler described the blast hurling stones, timber, and men into the air together.
Red Hugh’s forces stormed the breach that followed, and a bloody fight for the garrison’s storehouse only ended when both Niall Garve’s men and the English defenders were able to drive them off. Red Hugh soon laid down the siege, having been called elsewhere by news that a Spanish fleet had landed at Kinsale to support the Irish cause.
It was what happened next to the castle itself, not the friary, that is to Donegal its darkest and strangest historical footnote. A contemporary bardic poem, written on the destruction of Donegal Castle and addressed directly to its ruins, says that O’Donnell did not leave his home territory for the last time until he had reduced his own ancestral fortress to rubble, that it would never serve, in the poem’s words, as “a fortress for strangers.”
An earlier report reaching the Dublin government in 1588 had already claimed the O’Donnells planned to burn the castle rather than let the English have it, and the poem’s own editor has suggested the actual burning may be dated to 1595, when O’Donnell’s forces torched Sligo Castle and other strongholds across north Connacht.
The date isn’t fixed by surviving reports, but the tradition is firm on the essential point: an O’Donnell chieftain looked at his family’s seat, his ancestor’s fortress, and chose to destroy it himself rather than see it used as a base for anyone else’s soldiers.
Red Hugh never returned to see what became of the ruin. He marched south to meet the Spanish at Kinsale, was routed there with his ally Hugh O’Neill in the battle that marked the end of the Nine Years’ War, and sailed for Spain to plead for a second Spanish expedition. He died there in September 1602, still in exile.
It was his brother, Rory O’Donnell, who inherited the earldom of Tyrconnell and who, six years later, left Ulster for good as one of the two earls at the heart of the 1607 Flight of the Earls, an event sometimes mistakenly attributed to Red Hugh, who had by then been dead for five years.
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A Jacobean Manor Grows From the Ruin
Whether Rory O’Donnell ever renovated the castle during his short stay is not known. However, by 1610 an English planter, Sir Basil Brooke, was in overall command of its garrison; he was given a long lease in 1620 and permanent grant of the property in 1623.
Rather than clear the old O’Donnell tower house and build fresh, Brooke built on to and around it, inserting large mullioned and transomed windows in the fashionable early seventeenth-century style, adding a magnificent fireplace on the second floor carved with his own coat of arms alongside his wife’s family crest and topping the tower with curious projecting turrets carried on carved corbels, to impress anyone approaching the entrance below. He also built an all new three-story wing to the southeast, providing the castle with a grander entrance and much more living space for his household. He was knighted in 1616 and died in 1633 still in residence.
His son, Sir Henry Brooke, held Donegal Castle for the Crown during the rebellion of 1641, as part of the Laggan force defending northwest Ulster. The castle changed hands twice more during the turmoil of the following decade, captured in May 1651 by the Marquess of Clanricarde’s Confederate and Ulster forces, then abandoned as Cromwellian troops under Sir Charles Coote advanced, passing into his control.
No longer served as a residence. It fell into slow decay, eventually passing into the ownership of the Gore family, Earls of Arran, before being donated to the Irish state in 1898. The Office of Public Works undertook an extensive restoration and partial rebuilding between 1991 and 1996, which is substantially the castle visitors walk through today.
Why Donegal Castle Is Considered Haunted
Red Hugh’s Cries From Spain
The castle’s most famous legend is inextricably linked with the man who burned it. According to the local legend, if one listens carefully to the house at night while facing the River Eske, it is possible to hear the lamentations of a man who drowned there, the unfortunate Red Hugh O’Donnell, who died in exile in Spain and could not return to the castle, which he had previously owned and destroyed to keep it from falling into the hands of strangers.
This legend is definitely striking in this line of historical events. The poem composed by bards in 1601 for the ruined castle sounds like a real requiem for the long-deserted fortress. It is impossible not to feel regret when reading the lines in which the author addresses the fortress’s battlements and walls, trying to explain the reasons for their destruction. It is difficult to separate the facts from the fiction in this case, but regardless of the truth, it is fascinating how such a story could have been born and have persisted for so long. The story of the chief’s ghost lamenting on the other side of the sea about the ruin he caused and could not save seems incredible enough, but it is understandable where such a myth could have come from.
A History Restless Enough to Speak For Itself
Beyond that specific legend, Donegal Castle does not possess the lengthy catalog of named apparitions or documented sightings other Irish castles might collect, and it is important to acknowledge that plainly rather than fabricating a more hectic ghost story than the record provides.
Instead, it boasts a legitimately violent and unsettled history packed into a small footprint: a Norse fort burned in 1159, a stone castle deliberately destroyed by its own builder’s descendant in the midst of a doomed rebellion, a fireplace still bearing the arms of the planter family which rebuilt it, and two more sieges before the seventeenth century was out. Visitors and local guides alike commonly cite that accumulated weight of conflict as being sufficient reason behind the castle’s reputation, no matter the long list of confirmed encounters it does not possess to point to either.
Visiting Donegal Castle Today
Donegal Castle stands on Castle Street in the heart of Donegal Town, a short walk from the Diamond and easy to pair with a visit to the ruined Donegal Abbey across the river, the site of the 1601 siege. The castle is managed by the Office of Public Works as a state heritage site.
Inside the restored tower house and Brooke’s Jacobean wing, look for the great second-floor fireplace carved with the Brooke coat of arms, the barrel-vaulted ground floor, the tower’s original defensive features including a blocked gun loop and a stairwell likely designed to guard against attackers, and furnished rooms, including tapestries and a restored great hall, that evoke both the O’Donnell period and Brooke’s later occupation.
As of 2026, the castle is open daily, though hours can shift seasonally, and admission runs a few euro for adults with reduced rates for seniors, children, and families. Given how much visiting information at Irish OPW sites can change with the season, it’s worth checking current hours and admission directly with Heritage Ireland before you go.
Have you stood by the Eske at night and heard something you couldn’t quite place? Let us know in the comments below.
Sources consulted for the historical details in this post include P., “The Castle of Donegal,” The Irish Penny Journal*, Vol. 1, No. 24 (Dec. 12, 1840), pp. 185–187 (accessed via JSTOR); T. E. McNeill and M. A. Wilkin, “Donegal Castle,”* Ulster Journal of Archaeology*, Third Series, Vol. 58 (1999), pp.
81–89 (accessed via JSTOR); Matthew McGinty, “Red Hugh O’Donnell, Niall Garbh O’Donnell and the Siege of Donegal Abbey,”* Tales from Early Modern Ireland (Nov. 29, 2024); Wikipedia’s entries on Donegal Castle, Red Hugh O’Donnell, and Rory O’Donnell, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell; and the Heritage Ireland / Office of Public Works Donegal Castle visitor page for current visiting information.
