DONEGAL

DONEGAL IS RENOWNED FOR ITS CRAFTWORK.
HAND WEAVING IS AN ART STILL PRACTISED IN MANY PARTS OF THE COUNTRY.

The presence of some of the original hand looms provide a suitable backdrop for the Magee woven tweeds, which are sold by the yard to customers, while being appreciated internationally by such prestigious designers and brand manufacturers as Ralph Lauren, Armani, Henry White and Ramsey.

Magee’s retail store has expanded considerably and is currently the largest fashion store in the North-West region. Specialising in quality clothing, the store’s men’s department has the county’s most extensive selection of suits, jackets and trousers each carrying the distinct Magee brand. Ardara, on the trout rich Owentocker however is the county’s tweed capital.

Glenties has a September Harvest Fair and Heritage Centre. Glencolumbkille is noted for its St Columba’s penitential pilgrimage (on June 9th) and Folk Village Museum.

Carrick and Kilcar have attractive little harbours. Killybegs is one of the country’s major fishing ports.

North of Gweebarra Bay come ‘The Rosses’, Irish for ‘The Headlands’, dotted with tiny villages.

Dunglow/Dunloe, the region’s tiny capital, with its white marble church, sits west of ‘The Poisoned Glen’. Offshore, south, is Aran Island with its population of 900 souls, reached by boat from Burtonport. North is more remote Tory Island, reached on a 15-mile journey by boat from Bunbeg tiny port for the region known as Gweedore, north of the Rosses.
The Island, once home to Balor the one eyed Celtic God, then later to North African pirates, is now internationally known for its school of primitive painters.

In Kilcar, in South West Donegal, is an inherited tradition in handweaving and woollen manufacture and here is Studio Donegal where the craft still produces quality Donegal tweeds.

Glenveagh National Park stretches across 28,000 acres in county mountain fastness. Splendid formal gardens surround the 1870-built Glenveagh Castle once owned by the family who devised Tabasco sauce.

In many ways the Gardens are America’s gift to Ireland. The castle itself was designed by John Townsend Trench for a Mrs Cornelia Adair, an American heiress, who immediately began work on re-working the bare hillside. When she died in 1929 the work was continued by the new owner, Kingsley Porter, Professor of Art at Harvard University, and turned to perfection by its next owner, another American, the flamboyant Philadelphian Henry J. McIlhenny, who though he only spent just three months each year in Donegal, engaged the services of the great landscape architect Lanning Roper and that splendid plantsman James Russell. By 1967, after 30 years under the Tabasco king’s influence the work was complete but the philanthropist did introduce further plants right up till 1983 when he gifted the Gardens to the nation. As Mrs Adair’s husband John (who had never even lived in the castle) had first bought the grounds as a
sporting estate and cruelly evicted all the tenants between the years of
1857 and 1859, this was a most suitable conclusion to a saga with a grim beginning.

A walk round the gardens will begin in the Pleasure Ground, to the Castle’s north. Shrubs and tress border the lawn in a shape echoing the outline of the dark peat black and mysterious waters of Lough Veagh below the castle. Scots pine, tree rhododendrons, and tree ferns provide shelter. Primulas, agapanthus, azaleas, arum lilies and meconopsis sparkle in the borders. From the Pleasure Ground visitors take the rhododendron rich Belgian Walk — laid down by convalescing Belgian soldiers during the Great War — then pass the stone-flagged Italian terrace which, with its statues and terracotta pots was added only in 1966.

Much more formal is the Walled Garden which, with its square beds, mixed fruit, flower and vegetable in the jardin potager style. Below clipped box hedges lead to the gothic orangery designed by Philippe Julian. The herbaceous borders are splendid with cottage flowers – delphinium, iris, germanium and phlox. The double herbaceous border which runs through the centre is a true delight, as are the clearly labelled vegetables, many obviously chosen as much for their appearance as for their culinary possibilities. Though apparently Victorian this garden was created in the 1950s. The thatched gardener’s cottage is much photographed.