BRIAN FRIEL’S DONEGAL
BRIAN FRIEL: I couldn’t point it out to you in a map, but I could point out four places that go to make up this one place. The general region, of course, is accurate. But the particular place within this general region is made up of three or four places within a broader area in the west of Donegal.¹
BRIAN FRIEL: The Border has never been relevant to me. It has been an irritation, but we’ve never intellectually or emotionally accepted it. We had a cottage in west Donegal, so we’ve moved our permanent home into Donegal.²
BRIAN FRIEL: A memory of atmosphere, perhaps. The atmosphere of a place or the atmosphere of a person.³
BRIDGET: You’ll be taught to speak in English and every subject will be taught through English and everyone’ll end up as cute as the Buncrana people.
GAR: She and old Screwballs off on a side-car to Bundoran.
JUDITH: Willie has a mobile home just outside Bundoran.
OWEN: We are trying to denominate and at the same time describe that tiny area of soggy, rocky, sandy ground where that little stream enters the sea, an area know locally as Bun na hAbhann…Burnfoot! What about Burnfoot?
FOX: Anything that’s going anywhere has to pass here. Dublin-Galway-Cork-Derry; you’re at the hub of the country, girl.
FRANK: I’ll get someone to drive you over to Derry.
MANUS: Joe – you know Joe – he was fussing about missing the Derry bus.
EAMON: Nora cleared off with a British soldier stationed in Derry.
EAMON: Remember dancing to that in the Corinthian in Derry?
DAVID: We’ll go to Derry next Saturday to buy some fencing posts, ho-ho-ho. We’ll get the boat there that night. And on Sunday morning there will be magnificent Glasgow.
CHRIS: There’s a new factory started up in Donegal Town. They make machine gloves more quickly there and far more cheaply.
FRANK: So on the last day of August we crossed from Stranraer to Larne and drove through the night to County Donegal. And there we got lodgings in a pub, a lounge bar really, outside a village called Ballybeg, not far from Donegal Town.
ALICE: All set, then. Where’ll we go? Glencolmcille!
In memory of those five brave Glenties women.
MIRIAM: Until Charlie gets home from court in Glenties.
HUGH: We marched as far as – where was it? – Glenties! All of twenty-three miles in one day.
Glenties film footage 1962
OWEN: Greencastle and Fair Head and Strandhill and Gort and Whiteplains.
MIRIAM: All into the car – back home like the hammers of hell – and you know those roads along the Gweebarra.
MIRIAM: Tell him we’re still waiting for the sewage out at Killclooney.
CASIMIR: Something wrong with the lines. Can’t even get the Letterkenny exchange.
ROSE: And he wants to bring me up to the back hills next Sunday – up to Lough Anna.
TOMMY: Tommy Boyle – from out beside Lough Anna.
FRANK: Fishing on a lake called Lough Anna away up in the hills…Ballybeg got its water supply from Lough Anna and in the summer, when the lake was low, from two small adjoining lakes. So to make the supply more efficient it was decided that at the end of April the two small lakes would be emptied into Lough Anna and it would become the sole reservoir for the town. That would raise the water-level of Anna by fifteen feet and of course ruin the trout fishing there.
GAR: Like the time I went to Lough Derg.
BEN: Took the jeep and went to the dance in Omagh.
GRACE: Anyhow I went home. For the first time and the last time. I got the night-crossing from Glasgow and then the bus to Omagh and walked the three miles out to Knockmoyle.
St Conall’s monastery on Inishkeel Island at Portnoo:
TERRY: And there’s the ruins of a Middle Age church dedicated to Saint Conall.
BEN: That famous picnic years ago.
HELEN: On Portnoo Pier.
SIR: And across the bay there’s an attractive little island (Innishkeel). Actually you don’t walk out from Portnoo. You go to Narin just over the road.
TIM: I remember now. What she said was that her father had to be in Sligo at six for this political dinner he’s speaking at.
GERRY: Last night in a bar in Sligo.
HUGH: The road to Sligo. A Spring morning. 1798. Going into battle. Do you remember James? Two young gallants with pikes across their shoulders and the Aeneid in their pockets.
CHRISTOPHER: They could have got the length of Sligo.
GAR: I’m getting the mail van the length of Strabane.
FRANK: One day, out of the blue, a Friday evening in December, five o’clock… she wants to swim in the sea. And not only swim in the sea on a wet Friday night in December, but she wants to go out to the rocks at the far end of Tramore and she wants to climb up on top of Napoleon Rock… because she’s going to dive.
FOX: Should we go up through the gap or should we go round by the foot of Glenmore?
✭ Postcards of Donegal, courtesy of Donegal County Council
✭ “Derry aerial view” by yellow book is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
✭ “Omagh High Street September 1959” is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
✭ “Sligo county” by isalella is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
✭ Photograph of Tramore Beach. “Tramore Beach III” by niceguysean is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
✭ Photograph of Lough Anna. “File:Lough Anna – geograph.org.uk – 161737.jpg” by John Cromie is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
✭ ¹&3Interview with Graham Morrison 1965 in Murray, Christopher (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews : 1964-1999. London: Faber& Faber, 1999, p.6-7
✭ ²Kathleen Mavourneen, Here Comes Brian Friel Desmond Rushe 1970 in in Delaney, Paul (ed.) Brian Friel in Conversation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 2000, p.83
✭ Glenties, Co. Donegal, 1962. Tidy Towns Award original film footage.
An Action of the County Donegal Heritage Plan
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