As a chef and broadcaster, GARY O’HANLON has worked hard to build his own top table. On a 16 km hike through Glenveagh National Park, the Donegal native unlocks the route to his success
GHOSTS HAUNT THE Derryveagh Mountains, this startlingly beautiful landscape of valley, lake and mountain that forms the backbone of Co Donegal. You might hear them on the wind as it ripples across Lough Beagh and down through Ulster’s only national park, Glenveagh. That same wind rattles the windows of the park castle, too, as the ghosts seek out the man who built it and who put them to the road, and some to their end, on a whim. That man was John George Adar (known locally as Black Jack), an Anglo-Irish landlord born to wealth and opportunity, who bought up vast tracts of the Derryveagh Mountains in the 1800s to create his 28,000-acre private estate and castle.
In 1861, reportedly unimpressed with the presence of the Irish families living on his land, he had them evicted and put to the road in the now infamous Derryveagh Evictions. Cruel and brutal, some 250 people from forty-four families are recorded to have lost their homes and livelihoods in his vanity-fueled action. Many ended their lives in the workhouse, while many others were forced to emigrate, never to return. With the land cleared, he set about building his castle.
It’s in the shadow of this brooding castle that I meet Gary O’Hanlon, a chef, broadcaster and local hero who has made the art of emigration and return his own. Surely the ghosts of Derryveagh would smile on a man who also took the road out of Donegal but, through success, hard work and sheer power of personality, built a life for himself and his family that ensures Donegal is always his next destination.
GIDDY-UP
Standing at the trailhead, Gary immediately drives energy into our conversation – his lilting Donegal accent galloping ahead of even his own ideas, as he layers experience, drama and pure good humour into every tale. “Giddy up” is one of his catchphrases, punctuating the end of a story with an energising shift to action. This is a man who’s always ready to get things done.
Gary was already a chef when he landed in Boston at the age of 21, having carved a career path from a teenage apprenticeship in the nearby Rossapenna Hotel and Golf Resort, where his aunt is still head chef today. Once Stateside, he found safe haven in a top-tier Irish-run restaurant where he was further mentored and trained. But it was on the football pitch that he found his anchor.
Playing for a semi-pro soccer team, he lived for the camaraderie and sporting drama of the pitch – moving from first-division to premier-division teams in this most Irish of American cities with ease.
“I was the fittest I’d ever been,” he says. “Training six days a week, playing with the lads, really enjoying life. Then, in 2006, I was training for a marathon and out of nowhere, I got a cruciate injury. My football career died on the spot. I could still run, but I couldn’t twist or turn. A year later, I ran the marathon I’d been training for. I ran across the finish line thinking, ‘That was easy. ’ I couldn’t even celebrate because I’d never really got over the absence of the football. I just loved it. Nothing else really made any sense to me in the gym after that. I still train, but there’s a big gap there, a motivation that’s gone.”
“The team is superb and I try to give them the space to be the best they can be. My job now is to lead and manage people at the top of their game.
But the power of a team dynamic never left him, and it helped him build a career at the highest level, he says. Today, he’s the executive chef at the five-star K-Club Resort in Co Kildare, running a team of forty-plus chefs, each selected for their experience in the finest hotels in the world.
Alongside these, he places young entrants to the industry too, each selected for their talent and ambition. “It’s a massive team effort to meet the demands of our customers in the K-Club. They’re used to the finest dining in the world, and we have to match that. The team is superb, and I try to give them the space to be the best they can be. My job now is to lead and manage people at the top of their game.”
This is the Donegalman’s first year leading the dining experience at the five-star resort, but he has spent decades preparing at the highest level. He joined from the Condor at Chateau du Coudreceau, an 18th-century private-hire castle residence in the Loire Valley in France. Its clientele represents some of the most prestigious and successful people in the world who came to experience world-leading hospitality in luxurious privacy. Before that, he helped build the award-winning reputation of the 17th-century Viewmount House in Co Longford, an experience he talks of with immense pride.
There’s a managed effort to Gary O’Hanlon’s story that belies the hard work that went into weaving it. His television success as a chef on TV3’s The Restaurant, his award-winning podcast Dishing it Out, and his appearances on TV and radio shows all carry an air of a man with no weight on his shoulders.
Glenveagh Valley is a narrow, deep crevice carved by once-shifting ice flows that created a natural mountain habitat stuffed with life.
So, as we turn our backs on the castle and start our valley hike, it’s easy to imagine the road ahead rising in his favour. This valley path is not our first choice. We’d hoped to scale Mount Errigal but, in true Donegal fashion, this glorious mountain’s peak was lost to a summer cloak of thick fog, heavy rain and dark clouds. The promised hike to Donegal’s highest peak was impossible, so a diversion to the Glenveagh Valley was a natural solution.
Glenveagh Valley is a narrow, deep crevice carved by once-shifting ice flows that created a natural mountain habitat stuffed with life. The Derryveagh and Glendowan mountains hold its walls, while Lough Beagh at its centre shapes the valley basin. This lake is 6 km long, 1 km wide and 46.5 m at its maximum depth. It holds a cluster of islands at its northern flank, including a crannog mentioned in the medieval Annals of the Four Masters (circa 1632). It’s a place of high ecological status.
THE BRIDLE PATH
Our route follows the banks of Lough Beagh from the castle up into the mountains along the Bridle Path – a track first carved out on horseback. Before the path was laid along this 16km there-and-back route, this valley walk through the Derryveagh Mountains was almost impassable. It was so thickly knitted with forest and bush that it was easier to take the main road around the park to reach its endpoint, 300m higher up the valley walls.
It’s a relatively easy hike, listed as strenuous in some guides due to its length, but many people leave a car at one end to cut it in half. With plenty of woodland along most of the route, it can be tackled even in inclement weather, and it’s a perfect foil to the heavy black clouds that loom overhead.
The path stretches along the lake and up and into the mountains surrounding the valley. With steep granite cliffs on either side and a gently rising ascent out of the valley after around 6km, it’s an excellent way to feel the true majesty of this place and its changing weather. Indeed, 40 minutes into our hike, as though on cue, the clouds lift and a warming blue sky opens overhead. As it often does in Donegal, the summer returns without warning.
GLENVEAGH NATIONAL PARK
Glenveagh National Park is so much more than the castle and its gardens. It’s a truly wild place that thunders through the imagination of anyone who experiences it. Standing in the castle courtyard, it’s hard to visualise just how far the national park stretches, pulling Mts Errigal, Muckish and Sliabh Sneacht, among others, into its expansive embrace.
The Bridle Path, for all its gentle climbs and easy navigation, is a superb entry point for this geological and natural wonder. The views unlocked along this route will become the story you tell about Donegal, as your tale weaves along lakeside and forest glens, past long deserted homesteads and ancient island crannogs.
This is the landscape into which golden eagles were released to start the long, complicated journey of bringing this noble bird back to Irish skies. Since 2001, some 60 golden eagles have been released here and around 20 Irish-born golden eagle chicks have been fledged. This fragile population is closely managed and monitored, its success demanding that the environment, and the people who manage it, bend to the eagle’s needs: a wild, pollution-free, diverse habitat packed with life. Anything less and the golden eagle population will migrate or perish. Anything less, and this incredible landscape will be a shadow of what Gary O’Hanlon grew up in.
Standing on the banks of Lough Beagh, the lake at the heart of the park, his conversation travels to his hometown, Ramelton. Built on the banks of the River Lennon, this attractive town of cut-stone architecture and bridges is the last urban stop before the river reaches Lough Swilly and the Atlantic beyond. Famed for its brown trout, the river is also experiencing the rise of salmon stocks again after conservation actions began to repair a collapse caused by disease among the species in the Atlantic decades before. Not quite at the levels they enjoyed when Gary was a boy, the shift signals that the river is renewing.
It’s to rivers like these that Gary O’Hanlon returns with his three children, teaching them the freedoms of enjoying an environmentally sound and thriving environment. “When I say we’re heading to Donegal, the kids run for their crab lines and outdoor gear. Donegal means rivers, lakes, mountains and sea to them. It’s about wind and rain and the outdoors. I love that I can give them that.”
Lough Beagh’s Mysterious Eels
The lake at our feet is a vital environment, too. Fed by the Owenbeagh River at its southernmost point, Lough Beagh empties into the Owencarrow River at its northern tip. The ebb and flow of this river sequence brings life to the lake’s dark waters, including brown trout, the occasional salmon, Arctic char and minnow. The critically endangered European eel finds a safe haven here, too. This mysterious species has seen its numbers in European rivers and lakes dwindle by 90% since the 1970s, due to overfishing, pollution and parasite invasion.
Believed to originate in the Sargasso Sea, eel larvae drift on ocean currents before reaching landmass and travelling via freshwater to mature in the lakes and rivers of Europe. They reach Ireland’s shores in the autumn when they enter freshwater rivers, swimming upstream to seek sanctuary. Once they find it, they can live for up to 20 years. Eventually, something triggers a return journey for the mature eel, back downstream to the sea, seeking out their starting point in the Sargasso.
When they get there, they reproduce just once before they die. Lough Beagh, then, has become a crucial environment for the maturing stocks of this largely misunderstood species. It’s proof, if any were needed, that Donegal’s waters, whether at sea or in the county’s multiple lakes and rivers, are as alive and vital to the story of this wild place as the eagles and buzzards that fly overhead.
Our relationship with the sea, in particular, has changed dramatically, Gary explains, outlining the growth in the Donegal food scene and the incredible ingredients it cultivates. “I’m sometimes involved in mentoring and awards schemes where I work with people building food-related businesses or creating new products from local ingredients in Donegal. It’s a really exciting thing to be involved in. Just helping people work together, stand out and make their mark.
“Donegal and the people who live and work here need to find a way to stand out, and I really enjoy helping them do that. When I decided to be a chef on television, I asked my hairdresser to give me a Mohican. She didn’t want to, but I insisted because I knew I had to stand out. It’s sometimes not enough to be great at what you do – you have to help people remember you, too. I wanted people to say, ‘That’s the chef with the Mohican’. It was simple, but it worked.”
The sun is high in the sky as we reach the turnabout point on this 16km trail. The granite beneath our feet has given way to blanket bog on the lower reaches of the surrounding mountains. Bog cotton sways in the breeze while ling and bell heather grips rocks alongside the softer wet grassland. Glancing down the valley again, back the way we came, the woodland, moss and fern blend to a rich green tapestry that pulls us home, past the lake to the castle grounds. It’s an irresistible return journey.
“My career has always taken me away from this place but I’m so lucky that it’s my starting point and I get to keep making this return journey,” Gary O’Hanlon says as we start the gentle descent back into the valley. “It’s what makes it all worthwhile.”
The ghosts of the Derryveagh Mountains would surely be proud of this local son who has forged a life that is forever one of returning home. Giddy up.
Listen to Dishing it Out, the podcast co-hosted by Gary O’Hanlon here
This story is part of the hiking interview series, Who We Met on The Mountain
Read more from the series here
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