A debate has been ongoing for several years amongst many Letterkenny people concerning the location of the capture of Theobald Wolfe Tone following the failure of the 1798 Rebellion. Essentially it boils down to whether it took place in Letterkenny or in Buncrana. Many highly esteemed local historians such as Canon Edward Maguire and Sam
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On the 13th October 1916, the town of Letterkenny awoke to hear of the sudden and bloody murder of Patrick Anderson, a well-known pork butcher and egg merchant on the Port Road, who was shot and killed outside his business by a dentist, William H. Boland. Patrick (or Paddy) Anderson was 47 years old and
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Whilst archaeological discoveries of Bronze and Iron Age artefacts in the surrounding areas show small scale settlements over its entire history, there is no evidence to show that any town existed in either Letterkenny (or Oldtown) prior to the Ulster Plantation. The small balliboe of Leitir Ceanainn was once located within the overall...
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The name ‘Letterkenny’ comes from an anglicisation of the Gaelic name ‘Leitir Ceanainn’. Leitir comes from the old Irish word for a ‘hillside’, and anyone walking up or down the Main Street of the town today can easily testify to the accuracy of that part of the name! From the second part – Ceanainn– many
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