Shillelagh Shopping

Shillelagh Shopping

3 September 2025, Wednesday

As we rattled along in Fionnuala the Fiat we were treated to far more beautiful scenery than we had anticipated seeing on the busy fast road going south from Letterkenny to the town of Donegal, which is the county town of the County Donegal. (Live Your Dream on) the N15 is what the Rolling Stones surely would have been singing if they’d been from the townland of Drumkeen (Irish: Droim Caoin, meaning 'beautiful ridge'), and who were they to be going around telling folk which highway was the best highway anyway? If ever you stopped in the West of Ireland to ask someone the best way to get to a place, the response would go on significantly longer and contain much more detail than a blues song would.

The pick of the remarkable landscape was in the form of extensive peat moor gleaming in a mixture of purple, brown and deep green hues, and was occupied only by sheep, faeries, mist and the legends of long ago. Rapidly flowing streams, a few small waterfalls and the occasional copse or cliff punctuated terrain that the likes of William Butler Yeats would have been infinitely more skilled at describing than I could ever dream of being, though I did dream. All this we found in the area of Barnesmore Gap which guides the traveller through the Blue Stack Mountains that split County Donegal across the middle.

Another interesting feature of the route was that it led us through Ballybofey and Stranolar; towns twinned together as one conurbation just like Buda and Pest, or Burke and Head. Ballybofey in Irish is Bealach Féich, meaning 'Fiach's pass', and Stranolar is Srath an Urláir, meaning 'valley of the floor’, or ‘flat bottomed valley’. Unable to spot either of these geographical features, we just took the ancient town planners’ word for it.

Fiach, by the way, was a powerful man whose name in full was Fiach mac Aodha Ó Broin (Anglicised as Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne) who lived from 1534 to 1597. He was Chief of Clann Uí Bhroin (the Clan O'Byrne) and Lord of Ranelagh during the Elizabethan wars against the Irish clans. He has a mention in Planxty’s stirring song Follow Me Up to Carlow, even though Carlow’s 300 kilometres from Donegal in a downwards cross-country direction, and even the luckiest followers would only have had horses to make the journey on. Sixteenth century Irish history and twentieth century Irish song writing would have been so different had Google Maps and Fiat Pandas existed back in Fiach’s day.

Ballybofey was a busy place with nothing all that special to report except that we spotted a branch of Supervalu (the second best supermarket chain in the world) that sells the second most delicious scones in the world, so we hopped out of the motor car and converted a few euro from our holiday fund into a bagful of fruity sweet comestibles. It was there that we detected that we had strayed out of the Gaeltacht as people seemed to be speaking Polish rather than Irish. Due to our many years spent adapting to the Slavic way of life in our neck of Eastern Europe, our Polish vocabulary was as well stocked as our Irish vocabulary, and a cheerful dzień dobry (good morning) brought a great smile to the face of Agnieszka from Gdańsk who worked at the delicatessen counter.  

Donegal the town is a quaint but touristy market town ruined a bit by tourism and tourists, especially those terribly loud ones that arrive daily on the buses that cart them from the cruise liners that call in at the deep water harbour at Killybegs just along the coast. But some of them were alright and we were very pleased to have met a family from the Basque region of Northern Spain who weren’t able to help us with the machine for buying a car park ticket because it didn’t seem to work in any language, but they did show me how to download the Donegal Town Council app on my phone so I could pay online. I really wanted to say ‘eskerrik asko’ (the Basque words for thank you) to them but I didn’t know how to until a month later when I sat down at my computer at home to write this and looked it up on the trusty old translator website.

The main highlight of our visit was probably sitting down to huge plates of the most delicious fish and chips ever tasted, served up with a creamy pint of Guinness at the Olde Castle pub. This event coincided with a heavy shower of rain, a peak in our starving-to-bejaysus levels, and the arrival of the entire population of Providence, Rhode Island. Starving to bejaysus weren’t my words but the words of one of the Rhode Island people demonstrating to all those present how quickly he had picked up the local lingo.

The numerous gift shops offered stuff a bit more upmarket than the usual plastic donkeys laden with plastic wicker baskets of plastic turf, and the fridge magnets depicting lucky leprechauns winking and drinking pints of Guinness. I’ve mentioned here just two examples of the very popular artefacts that effectively sell Ireland’s soul to the consumerism devil, but in Donegal they were either not stocked at all or the shops had completely sold out of them. On their shelves we found some of the country’s most exquisite handmade ceramic teapots but their prices were exquisite too, and far more than we’d want to pay or something we’d only ever use in the musty rustic cottage in Portsalon as we already had the most beautiful teapot in the Balkans standing beside our kettle at home. They also had books written by Irish authors, which I always find even more irresistible than Supervalu scones, so I bought a bagful of them too.

What happened to the tacky tourist gift shop shillelagh? I’d been asking myself on a daily basis since 17^th March 1985, which was a Saturday. No, I tell a lie, it was a Sunday. Or was it now? Anyway, during the days of my youth, in every Irish household there’d be one of these symbols of the Emerald Isle hanging from a nail tapped into the kitchen wall or mantelpiece, and nobody who went to Ireland for a holiday ever left the place without one. To spend any significant period of time at a distance of more than ten metres away from such a talisman would make the faeries angry and curdle the milk in the cow. A real shillelagh was a sturdy wooden club used for self-defence purposes in the old times, traditionally made from knotty blackthorn with a heavy knobbed end. The gift shop replicas were usually weedy bits of some sort of a branch from some sort of a tree, twenty-five to thirty centimetres in length, bearing the words Good Luck from Ireland, or Céad Míle Fáilte (a hundred thousand welcomes) and shining through at least five coats of varnish applied to remove any little hope of authenticity that might have existed in their appearance. But they had strangely disappeared from the world round about the same time as the punt (the original unit of Irish currency) and Brendan Comiskey (the disgraced Roman Catholic Bishop of Ferns).

Protected in a glass counter in the Forget-Me-Not gifts and novelty shop in the Diamond (which was triangular in shape if looked at on a map) in Donegal there were three proper 1960s-style novelty gift souvenir shillelaghs, each being of a slightly different shape to the others. Three charmingly crafted offensive weapons, they were, with shamrock leaves painted on them for luck. The consumerism devil had the upper hand as he teased and tempted me.

The lady sales assistant said that if I bought one there was a cast iron guarantee that it would bring me eternal good fortune. So which one would I have? I asked her which one she thought would be the most brutal and instead of displaying the simple smile of amusement that I had expected, her face took on a sinister expression as she pointed at the specimen with the bulkiest knob. The smile did eventually appear when I asked if I could try them out. She apologised for her emporium not having the facilities to make that possible, so I acted upon her advice and bought the nice bulky one. And since that day I’ve not seen a single drop of milk go sour in a cow. I love it when salespeople really know their product.

Built mostly in the fifteenth century, Donegal Castle was the stronghold of the O'Donnell clan. Not a lot of people know this but, in 2015, cheesy country singer Daniel O'Donnell became the first artist to have charted at least one new album in the British music charts for twenty-eight consecutive years (1988–2015), when his latest release The Hank Williams Songbook entered the BBC Albums Chart at number five. The fear of the O’Donnells still being residents there, and us having to listen to recordings of every Irish mammy’s favourite old songs sung by their darling Daniel, prompted us to give the place a miss. And besides that, we’d visited it before and found it to be packed with people from the cruise ships who, generally speaking, were as old as the castle itself and gave the impression they’d failed to overcome their seasickness problems.

So we moved on to visit the ruins of Donegal Abbey where we found some rain and a family tomb engraved with the word(s) Ó Maoláin (my surname in Irish) but I didn’t recognise any of the first names of the people interred there, probably because I’d never been much good at keeping in touch with relatives, including those who had been ancient Irish chieftains. Between the abbey’s burial ground and the bank of the broad majestic River Eske stood a bronze sculpture of Hugh Roe O'Donnell (Irish: Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill), who had lived from 1572 to 1602. He was also known as Red Hugh O'Donnell and had been an Irish clan chief and senior leader of the Irish confederacy during a rising against the Tudor Conquest of Ireland, also known as the Nine Years' War, which had begun in 1593 but no one really knew when it had finished, if at all. I hadn’t previously been aware of this so I was pleased that a discovery made whilst walking through the riverside pay-and-display car park had prompted me to do a bit of research, but I was disappointed that Red Hugh O’Donnell’s statue looked more like Lemmy from the rock band Motörhead than it did an Irish tribal leader. But at least it bore absolutely no resemblance at all to cheesy country singer Daniel O'Donnell who must have fitted in somewhere towards the modern end of the family line.

Perhaps I should have mentioned earlier that the town and county’s name, Donegal (Irish: Dún na nGall), translates as ‘Fort of the Foreigner’ and was founded long before tabloid newspapers were invented to print headlines demanding that foreigners be sent back to where they came from.

Image:

My lucky blunt instrument.

Photographs:

The Donegal Dally