Dunaff has a long ledger of disasters. HMS Saldanha, a Royal Navy frigate, ran aground on the evening of 4 December 1811 with the loss of approximately 243 lives. Two decades later, in January 1832, six fishermen drowned when their boat capsized after a heavy wave. The schooner Janet wrecked near Dunaff Head in May 1839. The schooner Mary Hamilton struck the rocks in March 1841. In 1850 the Mars went down with all hands saved. In January 1890, nine men of a Dunaff fishing fleet drowned when one boat foundered in a storm. In April 1894, five survivors of the Ocean Witch reached Dunaff in an open boat after their schooner foundered off Eagle Island. The shore here gathers wrecks the way other coastlines gather pebbles. In June 1975, twelve anglers were rescued off the headland by the Irish Navy. The pattern has not broken.

On 26 July 1919, a thirteen-year-old farm boy named Patrick McDonald found something small and metallic in the fields above Dunaff. He picked it up. He used it as a hammer. The three-pounder shell, identified later by Lieutenant Long of the Royal Garrison Artillery as British in origin, exploded in his hand. He suffered the amputation of his right hand and forearm, fractures to his skull, and died of his injuries. His father John was a farmer. The war that had killed millions overseas reached Donegal one shell at a time, and the unfortunate child who picked up the wrong one in his own field paid for an ordnance dump that had never been properly cleared. There is no monument to Patrick. There is only the record.

Dunaff's geography made it ideal for illicit distillation. The hills rise sharply behind the bay. The cliffs hide ledges that no road reaches. In February 1927, Guards McKeon, Fox, and McLaughlin found a poitin still on Dunaff Hill, positioned on a ledge of a four-hundred-foot cliff facing the sea. The Guards descended halfway down to reach it. They could not figure out how to carry the still back up. So they dropped it into the sea. In September 1926 the Garda had already seized seventy gallons of wash, an intermediate stage of poitin production, from a cave on Dunaff Hill. In July 1928, Sergeant Tuttle and his men stumbled on another full kit of distillation equipment: still, still-head, copper worm. The raids continued throughout the 1920s. The product, by all accounts, was excellent.

Just past Dunaff Head sits Bothanvarra, a seventy-metre sea stack shaped, with some imagination, like a chubby Matterhorn. It can be reached by a one-and-a-half-kilometre sea passage from Rockstown Bay to the north or by descending a steep vegetated gully five hundred metres to the south. Both approaches require calm seas. Both are dangerous. Dunaff Hill itself, Cnoc Dhun Damh in Irish, rises to 210 metres. The headland it shapes has a four-kilometre stretch of exposed coastline that climbs to 220 metres at its high point. The north-facing cliffs reach 600 feet straight up from the sea. The Royal Commission on Irish Fishing in 1837 described local boats as in generally a very bad condition, the fishermen being too poor to keep them seaworthy. The reports continued for a century.

Standing at the lookout near Dunaff Head on a clear day, you can see Tory Island twenty miles north, the Inishowen mountains behind you, and the open Atlantic stretching west until it curves. The Mesolithic flint-workers chose this place for the same reasons it has continued to draw and to wreck people: it is exposed, it is rich, it is unforgiving. In January 1923, three armed men robbed the Dunaff Post Office of £100. Three locals were arrested. In 1962 three more fishermen drowned off Binion Head, just to the east. The names accumulate. The shore stays the same. The cliffs at Dunaff are the kind of landscape that long outlasts the people who try to live alongside them, which is perhaps why Ireland's oldest known campsite is here and why no one ever quite settled.