![]() Just a few years ago – in 2018 – he and I decided that that creative time in the village needed to be properly celebrated, and we gathered around us like-minded enthusiasts, and opened up the Ballydehob Arts Museum, using a room kindly donated by those who had taken over the disused bank building, right in the centre of town: Another generation has grown to maturity, further expanding the tradition of West Cork as a major and continuing centre of creative engagement in all of the arts, an epi-centre of delight. Many of those who established the creative community of West Cork have died. ![]() A few years following, another member of the car-team, myself and Clair, came to stay with the Verlings, and also remained in the area, setting up an etching studio on the other side of Ballydehob. Some ten years later, John and Noelle Verling (participants in that epic car journey) set up the Fergus Pottery in Dripsey outside Cork, later transferring it to Christa Reichel’s former premises in Gurteenakilla, Ballydehob, where it became a fixture of the creative community. Here was a living example of William Morris’s dictum, ‘Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’. This establishment, which seemed to have landed from another planet since the remainder of Main Street appeared to have experienced no visual or economic change from the images recorded in the black + white photographs of the 1900s, was run by two women, one German, the other English: Christa Reichel and Nora Golden. We sat in the café and drank coffee from the brownest of chipped brown ceramic mugs, ate inedible brownies and marvelled at the range of art and crafts being produced by this creative group. This was the world of women in flowing batik dresses, bearded men with bead necklaces and leather-thonged trousers. We entered to find a hive of creativity and alternative lifestyles. It might have been in Chelsea or San Francisco. What we found in Ballydehob was a house on the main street of the village with enormous flowers painted on the façade. Cork was then a darkly conservative place, ditto the Crawford and its staff members. Tent-less or Garda station camping would not be required. Fortunately, a more astute student rummaged in the car as we were leaving the city for the West, found a road atlas and announced that Ballydehob was actually in County Cork, a mere two hours drive over the potholes. A few days later we left the Crawford en-route to County Sligo. A forever-complaining student said that ‘He didn’t want to end up arrested as a vagrant and to have to sleep in a Garda station’. ![]() One of the know-it-all students announced that Ballydehob was in County Sligo and we would need money for petrol and have to camp when we got there. Somebody’s parent was away so this could be done without controversy. Since nobody owned a car, a parental vehicle must be ‘borrowed’. Here some vestige of Swinging London had taken up residence in a painted-up building called ‘The Flower House’. During the early 1960s, a group of students at the Crawford School of Art in Cork, heard a rumour that something bizarre was happening in a village called Ballydehob. One of the artists who happened upon Ballydehob at that time lived on here to tell the tale (he still lives in the village and is still a working artist): This building on the main street in those early days was particularly significant: It’s a colourful village today – as it was then: well-suited to the cultural heritage which the artist community of the time imposed upon it. What is less well-known – in my generation at least – is the fact that there was a similar cultural phenomenon in one part of Ireland – our own West Cork! And it was centred on Ballydehob – that’s the main street, above. What I miss most, perhaps, is the purple velvet flared trousers: sadly an expanding waistline quickly did away with them. I was around in London in the early sixties, and was definitely part of the swinging Flower Power scene: beatniks, Beatlemania, Carnaby Street, flowery shirts and ties (I’ve still got some of them – below – stashed away in my wardrobe!) – the regulation Afghan coat (and its distinctive smell).
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