Carndonagh is built around two focal points. The Diamond is the open square at the town centre, with a Saturday market from 11 to 4 and a clutch of pubs (Joyce's, Glen Bar, Tully's, Persian Bar) keeping the late evening trade. Just southside is the Church of the Sacred Heart, completed in 1945 in Romanesque style and standing on the mound that gives Carndonagh its name (carn means mound or cairn). Five hundred metres west, on Church Road at the junction of R238 and R244, stands the Donagh Cross. Across the street is the Church of Ireland Donagh Church, built in 1769. In the graveyard there is an ancient marigold stone whose meaning has been lost. Another four hundred metres north, a roadside white cross marks the Mass Rock used during the Penal Times, when Catholic worship was outlawed.

North of Carndonagh the land rises and falls toward the Atlantic. Malin is the attractive small village twelve kilometres north that gives its name to the headland beyond. Five Fingers Strand, named for the parallel fingers of sand reaching out from the dunes, is one of the most photographed beaches in the country. Up on Knockamany Bens you get the cliff-top view. Malin Head itself is the northernmost point on the Irish mainland, several kilometres further north than anywhere in Northern Ireland. Ptolemy's Geography of the second century AD called it Boreion, meaning north, which is still about the right description. Pólifreann, or Hell's Hole, is a cliff cleft that boils with spray when the weather turns onshore. The Eire 80 marker, one of eighty-two etched around the coast in 1943 to warn pilots they were approaching the neutral Republic, is here too. It became briefly famous when Star Wars: The Last Jedi was filmed nearby in 2016.

Northwest of Carndonagh, past Ballyliffin, sits the ruined sixteenth-century Carrickabraghy Castle at the western tip of the Isle of Doagh, in Pollan Bay. From 834 to 1215 AD Carrickabraghy appears in the Annals of the Four Masters, mostly recording the violent deaths of its lords. The present castle was built around 1600, abandoned by 1665, and finally stabilised with conservation work in 2013. A kilometre offshore lies Glashedy Island, uninhabited, used for grazing, and best known for the ships it wrecked and the scale of illegal poitin distillation the coastguard once discovered there. Fort Lenan, built in 1895 as a late addition to the Napoleonic-era artillery line along Lough Swilly, was held by the British until 1938 and abandoned by the Irish in 1952. It looks now more like a derelict factory than military installation.

If you have a day, drive the Inishowen 100, a signposted scenic loop of about a hundred miles around the perimeter of the peninsula. It coincides for much of its length with the Wild Atlantic Way, the 2,500-kilometre coastal itinerary running from Malin Head down to Kinsale in County Cork. The route takes in Buncrana, Fort Dunree, Mamore Gap, Tullagh Bay, Clonmany, Ballyliffin, Carndonagh, Malin, Malin Head, Culdaff, Kinnagoe Bay, Greencastle, Moville, Quigley's Point, and Muff. Bird-watching is the main attraction at Malin Head; surfing pulls travellers to Five Fingers Strand and Tullagh; Ballyliffin Golf Club's championship Glashedy Links hosted the 2018 DDF Irish Open. The driving is not fast. The roads are not built for it. The point is to stop often.

Ten kilometres north of Malin Head lies Ireland's most northerly island, Inishtrahull, with the Tor Rocks lurking another kilometre further north. The Irish name, Inis Tra Thuathail, means the island of the empty beach. Its fishing community left in 1929. The lighthouse keepers stayed until 1987, when the light was automated and the island was given over to seabirds. Landing now requires permission, especially during the May to July nesting season. The waters between Inishtrahull and the mainland are some of the most volatile in Irish waters; the landing point faces north into the Atlantic, away from the mainland, so it is always exposed. Beyond Inishtrahull, somewhere west across open water, lies Tory Island. From Malin Head on a clear day you can pretend to see it. Most of the time you cannot.