Eddie Doherty: handwoven tweed from Donegal

The clatter on Front Street

How a vanishing Donegal craft found its way onto the sofas at Breac.House

In the boutique seaside retreat Breac.House in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal, Ireland, the furnishings are just what one needs after a walk along Ireland's miles of unspoilt wilderness, sandy beaches, dramatic cliff scenery and secluded harbours.

The owners, Cathrine and Niall, have infused Breac House with thoughtful design details, such as the Donegal wool blankets in the boutique bedrooms and the sea-view living room. Wrap yourself in one of them and huddle close together while playing a board game at the fireplace at the end of an outdoorsy day.

They are woven by one of Ireland's last handloom weavers, Eddie Doherty. At the age of 16, he learned to weave by hand, and he's been doing so ever since for the next 40 years, with two long stints at large Irish fabric companies in between.

Based in the town of Ardara, the cradle of the tweed industry in Ireland, Doherty uses traditional methods to produce his pure wool blankets and tweed of a truly exquisite quality.

Ardara itself is something of a footnote town with very long footnotes. A handful of streets gathered around a market square, a pub-to-resident ratio that would make a brewer weep with gratitude, and on Front Street, the small shop where Doherty works. The loom inside is an architecture of wood, springs, shuttles and knotted ropes, the sort of contraption that looks as though it ought to be cordoned off behind glass in a museum, only Doherty insists on putting it through its paces six days a week. The clatter, once heard, becomes curiously addictive: a metronomic timber percussion that has been the soundtrack of this part of Donegal for the better part of two centuries.

His path to the loom was not a direct one. He came up through the trade as a teenager, did his time inside the great Irish fabric concerns, and then, in a detour that anyone partial to Ardara's drinking culture will applaud, ran the family pub for several years before returning to weaving for good in 1992. From the workshop now come blankets, rugs, throws, capes, scarves, waistcoats, caps and the occasional length of suiting cut to commission for clients from Manhattan to Melbourne. Herringbones in the traditional register, checks in the more confident modern one, and a colour palette that seems, in the gentlest possible way, to have been negotiated directly with the local landscape: gorse yellow, peat brown, the particular bruised purple of an Atlantic dusk.

The independent handloom weavers of Ireland are, by every honest account, a vanishing handful. Mill-woven tweed is everywhere; tweed woven by one pair of hands, on one loom, in one small shop on Front Street, very much is not. Which is rather the point of finding one of Doherty's throws folded over the arm of a Breac House sofa. Cathrine and Niall could have specified anything; they specified this. The blanket you reach for as the wind comes up off Sheephaven Bay was made a couple of hours' drive south on the same Atlantic seaboard, by a man who has been at the loom for longer than most of the furniture in your own house has existed. It is, in the quietest possible way, a piece of the country wrapped around your shoulders.

One of Ireland’s last handloom weavers, Eddie Doherty. At the age of 16, he learned to weave by hand, and he’s been doing so ever since for the next 40 years – with two long stints at large Irish fabric companies in between.

Eddie Doherty, handwoven Irish tweed, in Donegal, Ireland

Red tweed: Eddie Doherty, handwoven Irish tweed, in Donegal, Ireland

Coasts made of tweed in orange: Eddie Doherty, handwoven Irish tweed, in Donegal, Ireland