County Donegal is located in the far North West of Ireland, bounded on three sides by the Atlantic Ocean and with a land mass of 483,042 hectares. Almost 10,000 hectares of the County are taken up with water, including lakes and long tidal inlets. A considerable amount of the land is upland rough pasture and bog, so the challenges for those who have wished to cultivate the soil have been considerable. Geologically the county is complex, ranging from granite to quartzite mountain ranges and within these are a variety of soils left by glacial deposits. The gardeners, farmers and foresters of the 21st century, work with geological formations created millions of years ago and soils that took millennia to form. Our Atlantic maritime climate, of cool temperate conditions, makes for excellent growing conditions for the establishment of a multitude of flowering plants.
