Derry

Derry stands on the west bank of the tidal River Foyle, opposite the later Waterside quarter. Its Irish name, Doire, means oak grove; the earliest form, Daire Calgaich, preserves that woodland image. A monastery founded in the sixth century by Saint Colmcille, a holy man from Tír Chonaill, made the site a centre of the Columban church. The river supplied the settlement and linked it with the wider Donegal country before 1610.

Tudor conquest brought Derry into a contested frontier. O'Doherty's rising burned much of the town in 1608. Under the Plantation of Ulster, London's livery companies and the Irish Society rebuilt it as a walled city; the 1613 charter changed the name to Londonderry. The fortifications enclosed four streets around a central Diamond, overlooking the Foyle crossing. During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and above all the siege of 1689, the town's strategic position made control of the river road decisive.

A bridge joined the banks in 1790, allowing the old west-bank city to spread toward the east. Derry remained a regional port and gateway to Donegal, its trade tied to the Foyle estuary and the Atlantic approaches. The Irish and official names preserve different claims on the same place: early ecclesiastical memory on one side, seventeenth-century London investment and colonial government on the other.