We passed through charming Letterkenny on our first full day in Ireland, as we drove from Galway to Burt. We were tired from driving all day and so pressed on, but decided to stop and explore in a couple days when we made our way back south. You can do that when you have a loose itinerary and are doing your own driving — you can go anywhere you want, whenever you want.
Ireland is full of small towns. Letterkenny seemed bigger than many of those we passed through, but we were shocked to learn that at just 20,000 residents it is actually the largest town in County Donegal. The largest. In my home state of Indiana, and indeed across the entire Midwest, a town of 20,000 is considered podunk. Nowheresville, USA. But Letterkenny had it going on, with an active Main Street full of shops, restaurants, and night clubs. It was quite busy even midmorning on the weekday we visited.
We figured there had to be more to Letterkenny than Main Street, so I turned to Google Maps on my phone and to a tourism kiosk on the ground looking for attractions. Neither helped us much. The kiosk pointed to a tourism office on a map, so we walked over — and found no tourism office.
I said to Margaret that we should go get a coffee and then move on. But she was having none of it. She said, “I’m just going to step into this convenience store and ask.” I thought she was a little daft to ask a clerk in a convenience store about fun things to do in Letterkenny. But then suddenly the store manager came out with her and was busy telling her of, and excitedly pointing the way to, a number of great things to see.
He told us that the town’s cathedral was lovely and we shouldn’t miss it. Maybe it was because I was frustrated my methods for finding our way didn’t work, maybe it was because I couldn’t believe that a convenience-store manager was giving us tourism advice, or maybe it was because of my American small-town bias I couldn’t believe Letterkenny had a cathedral worth seeing, but I was thinking, “yeah, right.”
Fortunately, I kept that thought to myself. Because that cathedral — St. Eunan’s — is astonishing.
In the United States, you’d never find such a large, ornate church in a town this small. Yet here this one stood. Things can be centuries old in Ireland, so I suppose in Irish terms this cathedral is a youngster: it was completed in 1900.
Built of Irish sandstone and furnished in oak and marble, every exquisite detail in St. Eunan’s shows great care both in construction and in maintenance. Indeed, the church was renovated and remodeled in 1985, and its exterior was cleaned and sealed in 2001.
I’m not Catholic, so I haven’t spent a lot of time in Catholic churches. Except that I grew up across town from the University of Notre Dame, and my dad’s best friend was a professor there. So more than once I attended events at the majestic Basilica of the Sacred Heart on campus. Against that competition, St. Eunan’s acquitted itself reasonably well everywhere I turned.
I always feel a little uncomfortable making photographs inside a sacred space to which I do not belong so I set my camera on silent mode and shot from the hip. I didn’t want to call any attention to myself. Moreover, a few people knelt in pews in prayer and devotion. I was careful to leave them out of my photographs, and to move as silently as I could to avoid disturbing them.
And so these are all the photos I took inside St. Eunan’s.
Each of us has a style, an approach to things. When traveling, mine is to rely on maps and guides. Margaret, on the other hand, heads out with skinty plans and then asks freely of anyone. More than once, her willingness to walk up to a person on the street, or in a pub, or even in a convenience store led us to great experiences.
I suppose I don’t much enjoy talking to strangers. Ok, I’d rather saw off my arm than approach someone I don’t know. Yet more than once, my ability to interpret signs and guides and to work Google Maps led us to our destinations as swiftly and as comfortably as was possible and even helped us back out of places where we might get lost. And so as a team we had a better honeymoon than we would have left only to our own devices.
And if that convenience-store manager isn’t Letterkenny’s tourism director, he should be.
Canon PowerShot S95.
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