Qualla: Raphoe

Raphoe: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Read more: Raphoe on Qualla

Raphoe: Older Than Christianity

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: Raphoe on Qualla

Raphoe: Bishop's Palace and Siege

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Read more: Raphoe on Qualla

Raphoe: Holy Robbers and Wandering Bishops

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Read more: Raphoe on Qualla

Raphoe: The Laggan, Quietly

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: Raphoe on Qualla