Inishowen may be an isolated peninsula, but it certainly ‘punches way above its weight’ in terms of its literary pedigree. Local playwright Frank McGuinness grew up in Buncrana and has name checked the area from early works like Factory Girls to his latest work Greta Garbo comes to Donegal. Author of The Horse’s Mouth, Joyce Cary, hailed from Castle Cary near Redcastle and was very proud of his Inishowen roots recalling the view of Lough Foyle from the Moville road as ‘the most beautiful in the world’. Leon Uris’s fictional Ballyutogue in Trinity is widely believed to be based on Quigley’s Point/Redcastle where he stayed for some time back in the 1970s. Joseph O’Connor’s ‘Inishowen’ not so surprisingly has a lot of detail around the peninsula with key scenes occurring at Inishowen Head, Lagg and Malin.

Then of course there is arguably the greatest living dramatist writing in English, Brian Friel, who still lives outside of Greencastle. Each great work of his since 1966 has been written in either Muff or Greencastle & we’re happy to have such world renowned drama to have been ‘made in Inishowen’. We’re also delighted to see that Brian is the current holder of the Donegal Person of the Year. Friel’s good friend and frequent visitor to Inishowen, Seamus Heaney, has been inspired by the area with poems such as Sandstone Keepsake and The Peninsula.

Separate to this info we need to say that the greatest recent writer on the subject of Inishowen is Harry Percival Swan whose books Romantic Inishowen and ‘Twixt Swilly and Foyle are classics, albeit ones you’ll need to go the local library to find these days. Writing in 1949, local writer Harry Swan stated that “the beautiful and romantic peninsulated barony of Inishowen offers a vast field of activity to the botanist, the geologist, the antiquary, the sportsman and indeed to every tourist”.