Wild Atlantic Way Summer – Esk Mountain
Sustainable cookware & homeware range from a nature restoration project, Glengarriff, Co Cork
Esk Mountain has always been different. Widely different.
If West Cork is “A Place Apart” then Esk Mountain is the Place Apart in the Place Apart. It’s a 270-acre mountainside, on the road winding between Glengarriff and Kenmare, and for many years was home to The Ewe, the phantasmagorical meld of land art, psychedelia, surrealism and wild nature created by Sheena Wood and Kurt Lyndorf.
Today, the estate is run by Kloë Wood Lyndorf, daughter of Sheena and Kurt, and Kloë has extended the potential of Esk to include trail tours, dinner feasts, immersive nature experiences, foraging expeditions, bushcraft and survival courses, and has also fashioned a gorgeous hideaway where guests can stay on the mountain.
What is fascinating about Esk is not just what Kloë is doing, but the ways in which she, and her team of collaborators, are doing it.
In the artisan bread business, they call it Retro-Innovation.
“The word retro-innovation evokes a balance between our roots, our past, an ancestral tradition, a well-tried method… and the contemporary period, the avant-garde, new techniques, on the other hand. Retro-innovation is this balance between past and present which allows us to build the future.”
These are the thoughts of Apollonia Poilane, daughter and grand-daughter of the great bakers who created the global sourdough bread empire, Maison Poilane.
“The balance between past and present which allows us to build the future” seems like a pretty good operating principle, and when you visit Esk Mountain in West Cork, keep it in mind as you visit and explore the mountain.
You might come to Esk to stay in their cuter-than-cute cottage, The Nook & The Nest. Being here for even a short while will quickly reveal all the retro-innovations which the team have created: the river stones which act as kitchen drawer handles; the woodland lightshade; the stencil decorations fashioned from fern leaves on the bathroom wall; the table made from macracarpa. The accommodation is a mixture of inside/outside, with a canvas covered kitchen, garden seating, with a cosy indoor bedroom. The Nook is the Cottage. The Nest is the huge basket, made by Fibre artist Pacie Grews, where you can sit and swing and contemplate the forest all around you.
Kloë has also commisioned a series of cookware and homeware from Will Donaldson of Pengwin Industries. Will uses materials gathered on site to create river stone bowls and pestles & mortars from stones gathered in the Blue Dot River that runs through the mountain. There is also furniture which makes use of the rhododendron they have cleared as part of habitat restoration.
Their Land-based Living Kit includes outdoor cookery products, including foraging and pocket knives, bog oak-handled cheese and charcuterie servers that are fashioned from timber collected from the mountain and which hark back to traditional fire cooking equipment.
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Esk Mountain is the Magic Mountain.
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