Donegal tweed is a
handwoven tweed manufactured in County Donegal, Ireland. Donegal has
for centuries been producing tweed from local materials in the making
of caps, suits and vests. Sheep thrive in the hills and bogs of
Donegal, and indigenous plants such as blackberries, fuchsia, gorse
(whins), and moss provide dyes. Towards the end of the eighteenth
century The Royal Linen Manufacturers of Ulster distributed
approximately six thousand flax wheels for spinning wool and sixty
looms for weaving to various Donegal homesteads. These machines
helped establish the homespun tweed industry in nineteenth-century
Donegal.
Donegal Tweed
fabric.
With the
characteristic small pieces of yarn in different colours.
While the weavers in
County Donegal provide a number of different tweed fabrics, including
herringbone and check patterns, the area is best known for a
plain-weave cloth of differently-coloured warp and weft, with small
pieces of yarn in various colours woven in at irregular intervals to
produce a heathered effect. Such fabric is often labeled as "donegal"
(with a lowercase "d") regardless of its provenance.
Much of the
development in textiles in Ireland from the C18th was based on linen.
The growing commercial linen trade attracted families who had woven
for themselves, so that linen had a very long history, albeit only in
pockets of rich soil in the west.
By the late C18th,
premiums were also paid to flax-growers in the form of wheels and
looms – in a single year 6,000 wheels and looms were distributed in
Donegal alone. Without them and the knowledge of their use, it is
improbable that efforts would have been made to develop a tweed
industry in those parts of the county. Woollen yarn for knitting and
weaving could be made on the old flax wheels; spinning needed no
revival, it had never died out. The woollen products of the area had
been sold at Ardara Fair for many years.
In "Reminiscences
of Donegal Industries" published by the Irish Homestead Journal
of 1897, there is a description of how "Homespuns have been
manufactured in these mountain districts extending from Ardara to
Glenhead from time immemorial. In my childhood's days, the peasantry
made their own blankets, flannels, etc. …. The woven goods were
cleaned, dressed and finished in "tuck mills"…[one of
which] is on a tributary stream of the Ardara River."
In the mid-1880s a
parliamentary Select Committee on Industries in Ireland began an
official survey of conditions throughout the over-populated,
under-employed poor regions of Ireland, including county Donegal. The
Donegal Industrial Fund, directed by Mrs Ernest Hart, began to press
for some sort of quality control for flannel and frieze. Dr Townsend
Gahan, inspector for the Congested Districts Board, advocated a depot
where webs of yarn could be checked for consistency in width, colour
and quality of fibre.
Inspections took
place on what became known as "Depot Day".James Molloy of
Ardara established an export market in New York for knits and tweeds.
Spinning and weaving survived into the 1950s, enduring peaks and
troughs, often due to quota systems placed on textile imports to the
USA.
The industry began
to lose its cottage-based element with the arrival of the power
looms. In common with today's textile manufacturing companies in
Ireland, cheaper labour overseas has put paid to the large-scale
production of woollen goods produced here. However, the larger
companies have diversified into the production of soft furnishing and
high fashion clothing. Noted Donegal author and environmentalist,
Judith Hoad states:
"Only a
generation ago, Donegal Tweed embodied the integration between the
sheep, the plants (used in the dyeing process) and the human
population of its place of production – a kind of symbiosis
existed. That symbiosis in the domestic production of tweed has
disappeared. Mechanised, factory production may clothe more people,
but it is in essence impersonal. The individuality…has gone. I'm a
Luddite at heart and I mourn its passing*."
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