Bishop John Leslie was ninety when he absorbed the Bishopric of Clogher. He had become Bishop of Raphoe at sixty-two. He married at sixty-seven. He died at one hundred. Along the way he led his own private army into battle, survived the Cromwellian conquest while almost every other Irish bishop fell, ordered four Presbyterian ministers arrested when they refused to appear in his court, and built himself a stone palace on a hill using rubble from an ancient Round Tower. By the standards of seventeenth-century Donegal that was a relatively quiet career. Raphoe is the kind of place where the local clergy could be more dangerous than the local lords - and where a 4,000-year-old stone circle still stands a short walk from the high street.
Just outside Raphoe sits the Beltany stone circle - one of the largest in Ireland, 44 metres in diameter, made up of more than sixty stones. It dates to around 2000 BC and was originally an enclosed cairn. Its name almost certainly comes from Beltane, the Celtic fire festival of fertility marking the start of summer. Stand inside the circle at dawn on May 1st and you can see why people built things like this. Around 550 AD, the Irish patron saint Columba - Colmcille, in his Donegal name - founded a monastic settlement here. His kinsman Eunan (Adamnan in older Irish) developed the site further and gave his name to the cathedral that now stands on the spot. Some ninth-century stones can be found embedded in the porch and north wall of the present cathedral. The southeast corner of the building dates to the twelfth century. The bulk of the current cathedral, however, is from the 1730s - making Raphoe a layered Christian site stacked on top of an older pre-Christian one.
Raphoe Castle, built in the 1630s, looks like a castle and was used like one, but it was never a fortress in the military sense. It was the Bishop's Palace. John Leslie built it in 1637, using stone from the ancient Round Tower, because he felt threatened in his new bishopric. He was right to worry. In 1641, an Irish rebellion broke out and Leslie had to shelter in the palace until the Lagganeer army relieved him. Eight years later, with the country in a different war, Cromwell's troops besieged him there. He surrendered - the only Protestant bishop in Ireland to come out of the Cromwellian period alive and in his see. After the Restoration in 1660, his bishopric was restored. In 1798, more than a century later, the castle was attacked again, this time by United Irishmen during their rebellion; three of the attackers died in the assault. The castle survived all of this only to be destroyed by an accidental fire in 1838. The ruin still stands above the town.
Raphoe's clerical history reads like a novel. Bishop Philip Twysden, who held the see from 1747 to 1752, spent little time in Donegal and squandered the family fortune in London - and was, according to later reports, shot while attempting to rob a stagecoach. The story may or may not be precisely accurate, but it persists. Bishop George Montgomery, the first Protestant bishop of Raphoe in 1605, mostly busied himself reclaiming church lands. Bishop Andrew Knox repaired and rebuilt the cathedral between 1611 and 1633 - a stone inscribed 'And. Knox II. Epi. Cura' marks his work in the porch. Sandy Montgomery, a kinsman of Bishop George, lies in the churchyard with the inscription 'Here lyeth the Body of Alexander Montgomery Esq., who departed this Life 29 September 1800, aged 78. He Represented this once Independent Country, 32 years.' That phrase - 'this once Independent Country' - was carved less than three months after the Acts of Union dissolved the Irish parliament. Stone often gets in the last word.
Raphoe sits in the fertile lowland district of East Donegal known as the Laggan - some of the best farming country in Ulster. The town was laid out in the Ulster Plantation pattern, with the Diamond at the centre, like Donegal Town and Derry. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Raphoe still bears the name, although the bishop now sits in the larger town of Letterkenny. The Church of Ireland Diocese of Derry and Raphoe was eventually merged with Derry, leaving Raphoe Cathedral still in use but no longer the seat of a bishop. The town's recent history includes a strange chapter from the early 2000s when the Morris Tribunal investigated allegations of Garda corruption around the framing of local publican Frankie McBrearty for the murder of cattle dealer Richie Barron. Sir Gerry Robinson, the businessman who chaired Granada, lived at Oakfield Park on the outskirts until his death in 2021; his estate, with its Georgian house and miniature railway, is open to the public. Raphoe today is small and quiet - and very, very old.
Coordinates 54.84°N, 7.48°W, in the rich farming country of east Donegal known as the Laggan. The Beltany stone circle sits south of the town. From 3,000 feet AGL the river valleys and the fertile rolling country contrast with the rougher Sperrins to the east across the border. Nearest airport is City of Derry (EGAE) about 17 nm north-east. Watch for the convergence of weather systems off the Atlantic and the slow drainage of mist from the river valleys at dawn.