An Extra Lick of Paint

Old vet clinic, Schull

Old vet clinic, Schull

I used to live in Vancouver, on Canada’s west coast. It’s a beautiful city by any standards: gleaming high-rises, miles of seaside walkway, and snow-capped mountains lending a dramatic backdrop. I loved it, but when I looked through my window mostly what I saw was concrete and steel – and no colour! I had to escape up into the mountains or out to the Fraser Valley to get in contact with nature and feed my soul.

Where I used to live

Where I used to live

Where I live now

Where I live now

In West Cork, my soul is fed every day, every time I look out the window of our house, every time I stroll through our village of Ballydehob. That’s down to our rural setting, of course, and the magnificent scenery, but a huge part of it is about colour. I’m a colour person, I guess: I respond to it and crave it. I can certainly appreciate a quiet tasteful palate of greys or beiges, or any of the million variations of off-white when I see them. But left to my own devices I’d quickly have a chunk of candy apple red in there, or chairs the colour of daffodils, or a wall in a vivid pink. As Lady Gaga says, I was born that way.

Why is that woman taking my picture?

Why is that woman taking my picture?

And so I find living in rural Ireland a constant source of delight and inspiration. No country was ever this green, surely! Now the gorse is starting to bloom, turning the hillsides into a blaze of yellow. And every few kilometres along the road is another village or town full of colourful houses competing with each other for my attention. But before we get to the villages, here are some glimpses of houses just off the main roads as you drive those kilometres.

A Lick of Paint mainly featured houses out in the countryside, but for this post I wanted to show you some of my favourite houses in our nearby towns and villages: Ballydehob, Bantry, Skibbereen and Schull.

On the outskirts there are new estates of identical houses, of course, all painted in identical shades of cream. But in the steep and windy streets behind the shops you find little old terraced houses lovingly done up, the walls, doors and windows all in contrasting hues and with knife-edge divisions of colour between neighbours.

Skibb town house 2

Skibbereen townhouse

Electric yellow and – what IS that colour?

It can be like walking through a giant Rubik’s Cube (ok, that dates me) or one of those kaleidoscope tubes.

St James School, Durrus. If you were a kid, wouldn’t you want to go to a school like this?
Doorway, Schull
Neighbours

In his book, West of West, published in 1990, Brian Lalor captures my own experience growing up in a sea of grey. He says:

The nineteenth-century photographs of villages and farms show an unrelieved grimness of stone, cement and clay. Whitewash relieves this picture, though frequently this rendering has degenerated into a leprous greyness indicative of neither hope no prosperity. Colour has a symbolic relationship with the state of economics in rural Ireland. The last 20 years have seen the introduction of modern synthetics, bringing vivid tones not previously to be found here. Affluence and the EC have brought, as to the Aegean, a flight from the spartan virtues of white and cream…

Whatever the reason – prosperity, a sense of fun, a wish to lighten the spirits, the influence of the Tidy Towns Competition, an affinity with the colours of the wildflowers in the hedgerows, competition with the neighbours, the need to describe how to identify a house when street numbers are confusing or absent – I am grateful for it. It’s one of the things that makes rural Ireland unique and charming – and it feeds my soul.

Airborne, Schull

Airborne, Schull

The Gables of Ballydehob

The Gables of Ballydehob

 

32 thoughts

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  5. What is it that gives people the freedom of spirit to express themselves like this with their homes? It’s wonderful, feeds the soul as you say Finola, full of joy and hope, gives me a feeling of happiness just looking at the photos. This expression also takes place here on the west coast of Scotland, especially on the Islands, Tobermory, the fabled Ballamory from children’s TV is a good example. Must be the Celtic soul here on the wild fringes of Europe.

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  6. My recollection from my childhood in West Cork (1960 ish.) is of whitewashed houses and cottages with coloured woodwork, window and door frames, doors, facia boards and gates. The colours used were however quite muted. Red was more claret and green was like holly. It was much the same in Skibbereen save that nap plaster was occasionally relieved by pebble dashed panels. Window frames were white or cream but doors were allowed a little personality. This of course was before the advent of colours mixed by the shop to your taste.

    Hay sheds were faced with corrugated iron sheet and when new were commonly painted either dull green of dull red. Older sheds were of course precursors to “UILLINN” rust.

    By contrast my recollection of the people is of cheerful, courteous and kind men and women who inhabit my memories in Technicolor.

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  7. Spectacular pics Finola. You suggest that the colourful statements are a fairly modern phenomena. Is that the case or are our memories clouded, maybe by looking back at monochrome photos of earlier times? I recall Cobh in particular always being amazingly colourful from the river.
    Ah, the Tidy Towns! Dunmanway won it in 1982 and is still talking about it 🙂

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    • I lived in Cobh in the late 60s/early 70s and can guarantee it was nowhere near as colourful as it is now. But it was always a lovely town, full of potential and it’s wonderful to see how vibrant it has become.

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  9. Love all those colors. I saw the Rubik’s Cube on TV recently so apparently it has made a come-back, so maybe your not dated to much.

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  10. living in Lisheen along the banks of roaring waters, every day is a chamelion of magnificent colours…even the rainbows dip their toes into the waters and smile across the skies…..

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    • Amanda was quoting from the John Lalor piece I included. Leprous grey is a wonderful turn of phrase and highly evocative of some of the mouldering render on old buildings that have seen better days.

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