Donegal Shipwrecks

Donegal thrusts jaggedly into the Atlantic. It is Europe's uttermost shore. While the name Malin Head my stir notions of lonely winds and ocean spray, many other place-names are also redolent of a harsh coast: Horn Head, Tory Island, Bloody Foreland, Slieve League. There can hardly be a more terrifying stretch of coast than that from Slieve League wit its sheer 2,000 foot cliffs round past Rathlin O'Birne island, the holy village of Glencolumcille, and Glen Head - near which the drama of the Sydney was enacted - to the bays Loughros Beg and Loughros More, where the Duquesa Santa Ana of the Armada limped in. Throughout, I have tried to set the wrecks in their surroundings, places entirely the same for the visitor today. Perhaps the reader will be induced to walk golden strands like Ballymastocker, Port Salon, where the frigate Saldahna was lost in 1811 and only a man, a dog and a parrot came ashore alive, or scale a vantage point like Horn Head and consider the twin dangers for the 18th century mariner of being dashed ashore or being plundered by the "wild Irish". Many little Donegal graveyards yield evidence of forgotten disasters. At Kill, near Dunfanaghy, the middle plot of three, featuring just a few haphazard stones, was used for paupers of the famine and for bodies washed ashore. But at Culdaff, Bunbeg, Cruit Island and many more, the war graves are properly maintained and worth meditation on the human cost of sea war. I like seamless approach. That is, events are in truth indivisible into boxes: social history; economic history; biography; war; transport history. This book tries to follow a seamless approach. Plundering shipwrecks was a common practice, but is made more understandable by recognizing the poverty of the mass of the population, and, more subtly that the sea, normally an enemy, was occasionally a supplier of surprise bounty, even wealth, and the normal laws of the land - literally- were not applicable.