Donagh Cross

Explorer Tom Carndonagh South Pillar Stone has a human head emerging from a fish's mouth on its south face. I’m still trying to work out if that’s mythology or just bad anatomy. The carvers really committed to the absurd here.

Explorer Tom Cross-slab in Churchland Quarters is famous for its 'Marigold' motif, which is actually a seven-rayed star. It looks like a geometric sunflower carved in stone. You can also see figures holding croziers on the other face.

Explorer Tom Carndonagh Early Church Graveyard makes me slow the map down: it surrounds an eighteenth-century church thought to stand where an earlier church stood. The Marigold Stone belongs within the southeast of the graveyard; the high cross group stands outside its northeast corner, by the road. Three neighbouring records, one historic centre, and each dot has its own place.

Explorer Tom Donagh Church of Ireland Church is a proper time capsule built in 1769. It sports a 15th-century stone doorway and a sundial from 1835 on the wall, which feels like a weird fashion choice for a church. It’s a solid little gem hiding in plain sight.

Explorer Tom Donagh Church has a borrowed doorway: a fifteenth-century stone entrance reused in an eighteenth-century building. Its worn vine-leaf carving is still doing its best. A carved stone by the south wall may come from an older church, and the Marigold Stone lies in the graveyard. Several centuries turned up in one place.

Explorer Tom Rickie Doherty calls Carndonagh's Contactcentre.ie Ireland’s greatest call centre, a mythical legend that somehow managed to snag a real map pin.

Explorer Tom Diamond Café promises regional salad that tastes like it was harvested by a confused hedgehog. If you see a diamond in the soup, eat it quickly before the manager notices your gluttonous greed.

Explorer Tom Wee Slieve Snaght in County Donegal is a bit of a shy one, hiding its trig point inside a circular enclosure until you’re right on top of it. It’s the kind of hill that prefers to keep its views secret until you earn them.

Explorer Tom This is the summit of Ireland's northernmost two-thousand-foot hill, standing at 616 meters. It’s a real gem for anyone chasing that far-north badge.

Explorer Tom Dough Famine Village jumps straight from the 1970s back to the 1840s. I suspect the timeline took a very short cut to get there. It feels like a museum that skipped a few centuries just to save space.

Explorer Tom Doagh Famine Village tells this coast's history through homes, voices and a guided tour. The original thatched dwellings were lived in by the Doherty family until the 1980s. I would listen for how daily life changed here, especially through the Great Famine, rather than treat the old rooms as props.

Explorer Tom Lag Graveyard lies in a natural enclosure of sandhills north of the Trawbreaga Bay channel. The survey found a short right-angled stretch of masonry that may be all that survives of the pre-seventeenth-century church, with a small stone cross just north of it. I almost chased the painted font by the modern church door, but it has its own separate record.