Creeslough (, locally ; ) is a village in County Donegal, Ireland, 12 km south of Dunfanaghy on the N56 road. It overlooks an arm of Sheephaven Bay, with the population of the surrounding area engaged mainly in agriculture, mostly livestock rearing.

Name

The English name 'Creeslough' (occasionally 'Cresslough') is an anglicised respelling of an Irish name, the modern official spelling of which is An Craoslach (including the definite article An). According to the Placenames Database of Ireland, this means "the gorge". Under the Official Languages Act 2003, only the Irish name of Creeslough electoral division has official status, because part of it is in the Gaeltacht, whereas Creeslough village is outside the Gaeltacht and its English name has equal status. Craoslach is usually interpreted as craos+loch; where loch means "lake", while craos literally means "gullet, throat" and metaphorically can mean either a gap or gluttony. In the 1830s, John O'Donovan glossed the name as "Craoslaoch [sic] swallowing lake; throat lake", and Patrick Weston Joyce glossed it in 1875 as "Craos-loch — a lake that swallows up everything". In 2000, Lawrence Donegan wrote: Suggested alternative derivations are craos+lacha[n] "duck[s] throat", or crioslach (or variant críoslach) "limit, border". Niall Ó Dónaill advised the Placenames Branch in 1962 that, although there was evidence that Crioslach was the older Irish form, it had long been changed to An Craoslach.

History

Evidence of ancient settlement in the area includes a number of ringfort, holy well, enclosure and burial sites in the townlands of Creeslough, Killoughcarran and Masiness. Nearby Doe Castle, a tower house with a surrounding bawn, dates from the 1420s. On 7 October 2022, an explosion at Creeslough destroyed a shop and Applegreen petrol station, as well as the adjoining apartment block, resulting in ten deaths and multiple injuries.

Places of interest

Nearby places of interest include:

Transport

Creeslough railway station opened on 9 March 1903, closed for passenger traffic on 3 June 1940, and finally closed altogether on 6 January 1947.

Education

The area around Creeslough is served by three primary schools:

People

In popular culture