Coomhola: Final Farm

            I arrived in Coomhola, West Cork, a little over ten days ago. We're situated on the slope of a little valley, with the lane running one direction up onto rocky, sheep-cropped hills, and the other direction over streams and along a river until it bumps into the end of an inlet on one side of the Beara Peninsula. The farm itself is the site of an old iron foundry, and has been gradually reclaimed from weeds and ruin by our lovely host and her WWOOFers. WWOOFers (there were three others when I got here, one now, and four more arriving tomorrow) stay in a semicircle of four trailers around the terraced garden. Given the general spideriness and chilliness of the trailers, my preferred hang-out spot is the "Little House," a little stone house built by WWOOFers, for WWOOFers, with kitchen, movie projector, couch, stove, disco ball, and guitars (pretty deluxe, no?).

            Most of our meals arrive in pots and on plates fresh from our host's kitchen. During the week she bakes fresh bread and whizzes together soups with ingredients like apple, lemon and feta (though never all three at once, as far as I'm aware). On the weekends we are left to whip up our own beans on toast and/or omelettes. And our cabinet, although low on spices (we've currently got salt, a few shakes of pepper, and curry powder), is always stocked with teas, digestives, ginger cookies, and homemade jams. Salads are easy gathering from the garden, which is also producing beans, zucchinis, pumpkins, nasturtiums and borage.

            Work here varies depending on who's asking. Our host has had us canning blackberry jam, processing and freezing apples, making apple wine, weeding, creating hanging baskets, fixing the roof of a tool shed, and gathering wood from the dump to recycle. Her adult daughter has been making chutney with us and instructed us how to pull up some invasive Japanese Knotweed and burn it (a tricky task with the wind, damp, and heaps of green material), while her daughter's partner had our help carting, splitting and stacking firewood, and their 3-year-old daughter has instructed us that "you are going to have to do everything I say," which mainly involves making grass-and-flower potions, carving rocks and watching her dance and sing.

            Downtime, however, has been plentiful. We start late in the mornings, have 2.5 days weekends, and have had many outings to Bantry for shopping, a bit of trad music and the Friday market, as well as a night of set dancing at a nearby pub. The set dancing, like the trad music sessions, requires much practice and memorization; a half-hour lesson prior to the open dance only prepared us for a single song. However, it was worth it to stay and watch the long-time dancers (one a girl of only nine or ten) linking hands, spinning, and nimbly galloping around the room.

            Last weekend, we walked two hours up the road to Priest's Leap, marked by a cross. What begins as a landscape of smaller green fields and hedges ends abruptly with the highest house in the valley, and the bare, sheep-grazed ridges begin, patchy with heather and gorse and stone splitting through the skin of the earth. Sheep can wander onto the road in places, and will often give you a stare before scrambling down the hillside. Priest's Leap perches at the blustery top of a ridge, which plunges down one side into a river valley with a view of the distant sea, and falls away on the other into County Kerry. The story one WWOOFer related to me was that a priest on horseback was pursued up the mountain (by whom it wasn't clear), and finding himself surrounded at the very top spurred his horse into a giant leap -- and wafted all the way down to the town of Bantry, several miles away.