Doe Castle ‘Reflections’ © Scenes of Donegal / Martin Fleming Photography
Following Kinsale, and after a short interlude when the castle was held by the O’Donnells, Sir Arthur Chichester, a leading architect of the Plantation of Ulster and mastermind behind the Flight of the Earls, brought Doe under English control and it was granted to a succession of English settlers. The castle again briefly returned to Irish hands when Cahir O’Doherty took it on his way to attack Derry in April 1608. It was said that, in the subsequent siege to regain it, Doe only yielded after a demicannon had fired 100 balls into it. Doe was next granted to the Attorney General of Ireland, Sir John Days, who in 1614 sold it to Capt. John Sandford. In 1623 it was recorded that Sandford “hath made in it some additions of buildings, and hath covered the house and slated it, and is now building a stone house within the bawn”. 20 www.heritageireland.ie
The Sandford family lived at Doe until the Gaelic uprising of 1641 when they were expelled by a grandson of Maolmhuire an Bhata Bhuí with Doe remaining in McSweeney hands until 1650. The highpoint of this period was in 1642 when Owen Roe O’Neill, with 100 Irish veterans from the Spanish wars, landed at Doe to be greeted by Sir Phelim O’Neill; it was from there that the Gaelic leaders, with 1,500 men, set out to lead the Irish troops. During the eventful years of the rebellion Doe provided an isolated outpost to the Ulster Irish forces who were then being harried by Ulster Scottish regiments – perhaps a somewhat ironical twist given the McSweeney’s Scottish origins. Doe remained garrisoned by English soldiers for the rest of the turbulent 1600s apart from a brief period in 1689
when Donnchadh Óg McSweeney, who fought with James II at the Boyne and Aughrim leaving for France after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, took it. General George Vaughan Hart, whose initials are above the doorway to the east side of the keep, acquired the castle in the late 18th century. Like Sandford before him he too repaired the bawn wall and rebuilt some of the castle to transform Doe into a comfortable country house. Hart, who had served in both India and America, brought a number of cannon back from the 1799 siege of Seringapatam which ended the rule of Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore. These were displayed along the battlements on the seaward side; to this day two of them can be found in the garden of Arnolds Hotel in nearby Dunfanaghy. The general also brought