Donegal tweed manufactured for centuries it took on its modern form in the 1880s, largely due to the pioneering work of English philanthropist Alice Rowland Hart. While the weavers in County Donegal produce 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 labelled as "donegal" (with a lowercase "d") regardless of its provenance. Along with Harris Tweed manufactured in the Scottish Highlands, Donegal is
Lewis and Harris the main town of the island, and the civil parish of Stornoway, including the town and various nearby villages, has a population of about 12,000. Stornoway (') has ferry links to Ullapool and air services to Benbecula, Inverness, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh. ' (Tarbert) is the ferry terminal in Harris with connections to Skye and North Uist. However the main ferry to North Uist uses the terminal at Leverburgh (An t-Òb). The island is the ancestral homeland of the Highland Clan MacLeod, with those individuals on Harris being referred to as from the clan MacLeod of Harris or MacLeod of