A 12,000km trip to the Indonesian Isles was the catalyst for buying a house at Coolea in West Cork.
The owner of this four-bed, detached farmhouse at Milleens, near Ballyvourney, had been to the Indonesian provinces on bird-watching adventures, photographing birds of paradise.
She enjoyed her excursions so much that “it was painful to be back in a material, throwaway world”.
“I wanted, I needed to find a low-tech bolthole with lots of nature in the countryside. I play the bodhrán, so when I was in Ireland anyway, I saw this house and just fell in love with it,” says Jean Goldberry.
In 1996, when Jean bought this detached house it wasn’t the charming, rural idyll it is today: “There was no running water and no electricity, so a lot of life was by candlelight and involved filtering water from the stream. I was used to travelling with just camera equipment and a small medical bag at that stage, so living with no electricity and no running water was no problem to me.”
“I did a lot of the work, like mixing cement or cutting timber by hand. I put a roof on the barn and built up the walls with the help of a travel companion. I had been in dugout canoes in mangrove swamps in Papua New Guinea with my son, so this was no bother to us.”
It was initially a holiday home/project and then, in 2007, it became a permanent home and has “been brilliant”.
For someone who once travelled so lightly, Jean then transported some hefty items to this house, which is 20 minutes from Macroom town.
“They’re all part of this home’s history now,” Jean says.
Some more modern and practical specifications were also added, including oil-fired central heating and laminated glass in all the windows as a security feature.
Jean, an artist, who once worked as a British Airways cabin crew member — including assisting in an unexpected passenger birth, and performing CPR on a man who had stopped breathing — worked hard to revitalise the 7.2 acres around this house, too.
Part of the property is a ‘forest garden’ with an eclectic mix of native trees and more unusual ones, including blue sausage fruit, bladdernut (“which tastes like pistachio”), cobnuts, and Japanese walnut.
After air hostessing, Jean studied horticulture — as a professional garden designer, she featured on BBC Two’s Gardeners’ World. In the polytunnels here she’s grown cherries, nectarines, and plums.
“I’d love to see this house being occupied by a family with children again. There’s so much here for them. There’s the decking, the tree house with a ladder up to it. There’s so much room for more here, too. I have fenced off two acres. My own grandchildren were playing here the other day and I saw them bringing a basket with some croissants up the tree on a rope. There’s a firebowl too, where we reheated pizzas from the evening before from The Top of Coom, a 12-minute drive away.”
There’s also a pond: “I’m setting up the pump and water purifier and when that’s up and running again you’ll be able to swim in it. I’ve been in it myself.”