‘We are the keepers of the valley’: Cork hoteliers balancing business and sustainability 

Gougane Barra National Park is a landscape where time has stood still.

It was Ireland’s first national park, now it’s a much-loved and visited National Forest Park, and the fabled source of Cork’s mighty River Lee. St Finbarr’s Oratory has been a quiet observer of the valley from its lake promontory since the 6th century.

The mountains, unchanged for millennia, have borne witness to generations of people ing through whose history, in contrast, is constantly in flux.

Travellers have always gravitated toward Gougane Barra, and there has been a warm hearth and hearty welcome here since 1854.

Donnacha Cronin took a lease at the former hunting lodge of Lord Townshend, making repairs while working as water bailiffs on the Lee. The original Prince of Wales Stagecoach route connecting Macroom to Kenmare stopped here before trains took over, so Donnacha opened a síbín to serve them, soon followed by rooms to accommodate visitors overnight.

Today, the original Cronin’s Bar is a café serving small bites, home-made cakes, scones, and afternoon tea, run by Maria Lucey, of the fifth generation of the Cronin/Lucey family.

Next door is Gougane Barra Hotel, now owned and run by Neil Lucey, Maria’s brother, and his wife Katy. Neil is General Manager, while Katy is Head Chef and keen kitchen-gardener. Both are locavores and ionate about sharing a taste of the Gaeltacht Mhúscraí.

The hotel was established by Neil’s great-grandmother, Bridget Scriven, who married Donnacha Cronin’s son, James, and together they ran the hotel.

During the War of Independence, the hotel was used as a safe house and played a major part in the Gaelic Revival Movement as the site of Ireland’s first Irish Training College. The college subsequently moved to Ballingeary.

Unfortunately, James died young, aged 42. Bridget was left alone to raise seven children and run the now 10-bedroom hotel.

Neil’s grandfather Connie, one of Bridget’s sons, married Joan Manning. Joan was one of Ireland’s first domestic economy instructresses, trained by the State and sent around the country teaching women how to excel in domestic duties from cooking to raising hens, milking cows, darning, preserving food, etc.

It was Neil’s parents, Breda and Christy, who eventually bought back Cronin’s during the 1980s and, with Gougane Barra Hotel, established themselves as purveyors of quintessential Irish hospitality in the valley.

In 2005, Neil and Katy Lucey took the mantle on as the fifth generation.

Hospitality has been baked into the Cronin/Lucey family tree since the beginning. That tradition continues today, only now family legacy also means sustainability.

I met with Neil and Katy Lucey to learn what sustainability looks like for Gougane Barra Hotel, and how landscape guides their hand.

“As my mother expressed it, we are keepers of the valley and there’s a responsibility that comes with that,” says Neil. That sense of custodianship is carried with Neil and Katy in all aspects of their role as hoteliers, connecting their place within the landscape.

“It is a blessing to live and work in a place like this; we can nurture and sustain it. Over time, names of places may change, but they are still the same. The land that we walk was walked by those before us. There’s an ancestry here; they’re there with us, for sure.”

The need to live and work more sustainably is all around us. The unique location of Gougane Barra Hotel brings nuance to what sustainability looks like. It is, says Neil, a balance of industrial sustainability and a nurturing custodianship of place.

“We’re impinged by looming wind farms and that is modern industry trying to come in on this beautiful landscape. What we want to do is mind what is here for the future; for the people that enjoy it; to preserve Gougane for what it is, for the people that come here. It’s difficult to convince an industrialist of that.

“What we try to do is sustainability as preservation, to mind it and let it be its own thing.”

The private holding is some 800-acres comprising hotel, bar, and sheep farm. In Neil’s lifetime, he has witnessed how, as farming has receded from the mountain, the landscape is naturally recovering.

“My father used to say there was so much land here he had to stack it up on top of each other because you can’t see it under acres of mountain. As farming has decreased in the valley, we can see wildlife enjoying it more; birch trees are growing up along the side of the mountain. There’s a natural soft wilding happening; it’s doing its own thing, and we don’t have to interfere.”

The hotel has an impressive array of accreditations for its work to become a leader in sustainable hospitality, including working to the Green Hospitality Programme, achieving an Eco-Label Certification, and holding a Plastic Smart Green Mark for its work in minimising single-use plastics.

“Because the valley is so special, we must make sure then that what we do within the valley is not interfering with it,” says Neil.

“We have two spring water systems; the water is non-chemically treated with ultraviolet and sediment filtered so the water is pure. The water going out is in a biosystem in a protected space. We have had solar s since 2016 and are a fully LED operation. We’re trying to run a business that will not interfere with the landscape, and we’re conscious of that all the time.”

That ethos extends to food and drink at the hotel from bar to breakfast, a cuppa and a scone, to a meal. At every opportunity, Neil and Katy look to encourage their guests to experience the landscape by tasting what is made from it.

“Gougane Barra is this beautiful place at the head of the River Lee, but we’re also part of a wider wonderful thing. The first part is Gaeltacht Mhúscraí – it’s strong here, people can hear the Irish language being spoken with our dialect and expressions. Then it’s the wider West Cork region.

“So, when we welcome people here, first I welcome them to Gougane Barra, then Gaeltacht Mhúscraí, and then to West Cork. We do that because almost everything on the menu they will eat that night is from here, and we have certain things on the menu we would like them to taste because we want them to have that West Cork experience in what they eat and drink.

“That’s why we’ll encourage them to have a pint of 9 White Deer’s Stag Kolsch instead of a pint of Heineken, why there’s Folláin jam on the table, duck from Skeaghanore on the menu, and Darcie’s Carrignamuc cheese from Lost Valley Dairy with her four cows on the side of a mountain. Suddenly, you’re putting a very local picture together for somebody and expressing to them the benefit of what they are doing by being here.

“The West Cork food story is a much older story than, say, Galway. It’s historical for its food production and that’s full and wholesome. But sometimes, I think we take it for granted. We accept it and we forget to tell the story. That’s a problem, and we need to get better at ing to tell those stories of the foods and drinks of our area to visitors.”

Katy is head chef. Originally from Lahinch, her family name – Vaughan – is synonymous with hospitality. Her father trained at the Russell Hotel in Dublin with French chefs learning classics like twice-roasted duck with classic sauce l’orange. That same recipe was taught to Katy and continues to be a popular dish on the Gougane Barra Hotel menu.

Katy’s cooking also embraces that quiet sustainability Neil recognises in the landscape. It’s about great ingredients cooked well, often to a library of recipes ed down through the family – like the duck dish, or soups made to Neil’s grandmother’s style with a strong potato base, or Katy’s father’s version of a seafood chowder made with a light tomato base.

“There isn’t anything on the menu that comes from more than an hour away from here,” says Katy. “The last page on our menu maps all our suppliers so visitors get an idea where everything is coming from.” Even the Barry’s Tea and Maher’s coffee.

In the kitchen, there’s no room for short-cuts. “We don’t buy in anything prepared; we do everything from scratch. We buy all our meat and fish on the bone and work in a way that means we have very little waste. We turn food scraps into compost and use that soil in our raised beds for growing herbs and edible flowers.”

From scratch means also making their own stocks: fish, meaty broths from beef, lamb and duck bones, and vegetable stock.

“I do it so organically that I don’t think about what we do,” says Katy. “In summer, we have our own salad leaves, raspberries, blueberries, herbs and edible flowers. Nothing is wasted, and I really enjoy recreating with ingredients rather than throwing away or discarding.

“For example, we deep fry carrot skins and use them to top off a salad to give texture, or use left-over lemons and basil to make an oil that I mix with potato mash.

“It feeds my creative soul as a chef big time,” says Katy. “When you’re ionate about produce and you can literally put a face to what you’re handling in the kitchen, you can’t waste it because you feel connected to it; to the person who made or grew it.

“I don’t understand why [other businesses] in West Cork don’t buy everything they serve from around here. It would rise us all up because there’s an amazing community of producers here, and we are so lucky. Together, we are stronger.

“Neil’s granny used to say: Economy is the rule of the day. Lots of old recipes are a complete tradition in themselves, and that gives us something organic about our cooking and the way we run the hotel,” says Katy.

“It’s real, that’s the winner because we can give someone a real experience,” says Neil, “and we genuinely enjoy it.”

Sustainability, then, shouldn’t have to be just the data-driven industrial model. It all helps, of course, but Neil and Katy are wonderful examples of how finding other progressive routes. That sometimes you must look back to look forward.

“We’ve done a lot of work on our sustainability initiatives so far, but now we must evaluate what is done and what we do in the future and show that if we can it, so can anybody else,” says Neil.

“Let Gougane be Gougane, and we’ll do what we can to give visitors the best experience.”

See www.gouganebarrahotel.com