Laurentic Gun, Pier, Downings
A local dive team recovered the historic gun from the wreck of the Laurentic sunk off Malin Head in 1917. The cast-iron artillery piece - seven metres long and weighing more than seven tons - was finally taken ashore at the end of a mission that took three years to complete.
Built as a luxury liner by Harland and Wolff in Belfast in 1908, the Laurentic was requisitioned as a troop-carrier at the outbreak of the First World War. It took part in a mammoth convoy that transported 35,000 Canadian troops to Europe, before being converted to an armed merchant cruiser.
On January 25th, 1917, the ship was rounding Malin Head when she struck two German mines. The crew struggled to clamber into lifeboats in the dark to escape the rapidly sinking vessel, which went to the bottom 45 minutes later. It resulted in the loss of 354 of the 722 passengers aboard. 68 bodies were eventually recovered and buried in Fahan graveyard.
With so much gold lying on the seabed, a massive recovery operation was launched. Initially expected to be completed in a matter of months, the operation lasted over seven years, with 3,186 of the original 3,211 gold-bars being recovered by 1924.
The Hanging Gale
This was filmed in Meenformla near Glen Village in 1995 and it tells the story of four brothers of the Phelan family who battle to save their farm and their family from the ravages of the Irish Potato Famine in 1846.