Biodiversity Through
Apple Heritage
Walk into our orchard in autumn and you’ll be surrounded by hundreds of trees bearing fruit — some with names you’ll recognise, others you’ll only find here. This is the National Heritage Apple Tree Collection, a field genebank where over 200 unique Irish apple varieties are conserved. Each variety has a history. Some were once grown in abbey gardens, others kept alive in rural backfields. Some were forgotten entirely until reintroduced by our team through old agricultural records, garden discoveries, and community research. We don’t grow apples as a crop — we grow them as memory, as biodiversity, and as a resource for the next generation.
Features of Our Orchard
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Largest Apple Collection
Ireland’s largest public collection preserves heritage apple varieties for future generations.
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Organic Orchard Practices
Trees are grown without synthetic fertilisers or pesticides, supporting healthy, sustainable orchards.
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Heritage Grafting Tradition
Each tree grafted from heritage scion wood, preserving authentic, true-to-type lineage.
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Pollinator-Friendly Underplanting
Orchards enriched with wildflowers and grasses, supporting pollinators and enhancing natural biodiversity.
What It’s Used For
Why It Matters
Walking Into
Living Heritage
Visiting the orchard is more than a simple walk; it is an immersion into living heritage. Amongst rows of apple trees, each variety tells a story of resilience, memory, and care. Here, you step into a deeper relationship with land and plant, where biodiversity, tradition, and future sustenance grow together in harmony.
Taste an apple and you taste the past. Plant a tree and you grow the future.