Donegal Bay

We began our day in Donegal Bay with a visit to the small island of Inishmurray, which sits several miles offshore of the south side of the Bay, not far from Sligo Town.

Inishmurray is the site of an early monastic center and the corbelled beehive huts attest to the industry of those early monks. Later Inishmurray was the site of a few croft houses, now in ruins, where a small community once farmed and fished, perhaps until they too were forced to migrate during the Great Potato Famine. It is a place where the sense of history is palpable, and it was quite moving to walk among the old buildings and the cemetery and think of those who lived here in the distant past.

The landing on Inishmurray is in a natural cut in the sandstone that makes up the entire island. This rock unit is called the Torridonian Sandstone, and it looks quite fresh with well-developed cross-bedding and other clear depositional features; it has been dated at approximately one billion years. The Sandstone sits on top of the highly metamorphosed Lewisian gneiss and is juxtaposed with the highly metamorphosed Caledonian rocks of this part of Ireland and most of Scotland, and the mystery is how it survived the intense deformation of the two adjacent units.

During lunch we moved the ship to the port of Killybegs, the major fishing port of Ireland. Here we went alongside and started several afternoon activities. Some of us visited the many interesting archeological sites, especially court tombs and small passage tombs in the area. Others visited a nearby woolen mill, while the more ambitious took a vigorous hike to the top of a hill overlooking Glencolmcille near the great cliffs of Slieve League. Glencolmcille is thought to be the birthplace in 521 A.D. of St. Columba, the founder of the Abbey at Iona in the Hebrides where we will be visiting tomorrow.