Portkill (or Portcille) is said to be the place where St Columba climbed the headland to look back on his beloved Derry for the last time, before he sailed to Iona, to convert the Scots. He must have had good eyesight!

It has been a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of years. In the middle of the photo is a sandy spit of land, backed by a steep glen. People would climb down the glen in their bare feet as a penance, and leave a token at the bottom.

Inishowen Head is also the place where friends and relatives gathered to wave goodbye, also for the last time, to their loved ones on the emigrant liners from Derry and Moville, as the ships sailed out past the Head and into the Atlantic.

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