Anyone curious about important episodes in the history of Ireland’s long colonization by England could start with the 1607 event commemorated in the banner at the top right of this photo, the flight of the earls. This is is the lovely town center of Donegal (which for purposes of blog categorization I’ve decided is a very small city). Below are all the other photos from Donegal town itself, including a stained glass window from a church next to the castle which I believe would have been the seat of one of the two earls who departed in that French ship in 1607.  Donegal is the north-westernmost county in Ireland. Historically one of the “Ulster Plantation” counties, it was not among the six counties that since 1923 have been the Irish portion of that neighboring nation-state, the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” This visit brought home for me just how very colonized Ireland was for how very long, beginning at a time when the European powers hadn’t (yet) gotten back to emulating the Romans and forcibly taking large-scale control of large territories far from home.