Qualla: Dunaff

Dunaff: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Six thousand years ago, possibly more, people sat on the shore of Dunaff Bay and knapped flint. The flakes they discarded are still there. Archaeologists call it an industrial site of the Early Larnian tradition, and what they mean is that Ireland's oldest known Neolithic campsite lies between the cliffs of Dunaff Head and Lenan Head, at the very mouth of Lough Swilly. There is no evidence anyone stayed permanently. They came, they worked the stone, they went. The cliffs above where they sat rise six hundred feet straight from the sea. The headland is one of those Irish places that has been almost continuously dangerous to humans, and almost continuously irresistible.

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Dunaff: The Treacherous Coast

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 J...

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Dunaff: The Shell That Killed Patrick McDonald

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Dunaff: Stills on the Cliff Face

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 cl...

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Dunaff: Bothanvarra and the Headland

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 t...

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Dunaff: What Stays

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 d...

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