Gleneely
Gleann Daoile, Co. Donegal

A small crossroads village in the northeast Inishowen hills, on the R238 between Carndonagh and Culdaff, with an early monastic site at its back door.

Gleneely is a crossroads in the northeast of Inishowen, in the green farmland between Carndonagh to the south and Culdaff to the north. Population 236 at the last full count, up from 166 a decade earlier, which by Inishowen standards counts as growth. There is a primary school, a football club, a shop and petrol, and a pub. The R238 runs straight through the middle of it. Most people who come this way are pointed at Malin Head or the strand at Culdaff and do not stop. That is fine. The village does not pretend to be more than it is.

What it does have, and what most passers-through never notice, is depth of time. A short way out the road at Carrowmore stands the site of Both Chonais, an early monastery that radiocarbon dating puts in active use from around AD 590 to 1160. The name means the hut or oratory of Conas, said in tradition to be a husband of Darerca, a sister of St Patrick. A survey in 2012 mapped two great ringed ditches under the fields. Above ground, what survives is sparser: a tall plain cross on the west of the road, another within a stone cairn, a cross slab half into the ground. The seventh-century West Cross has short arms and no carving, weathered down to the bone. It is the kind of monument you would drive past without a second look if nobody told you what it was.

The village name, Gleann Daoile, carries the old Irish - the valley of the Daoile, the river. This is O'Doherty country, like all of Inishowen: the clan held the peninsula from their strongholds until the Plantation broke their power in the 17th century. None of that announces itself in Gleneely. It is a place to fill the tank, get a feed, and head on for the coast, with one good reason to slow down on the way.