Cork's wild salmon warrior Sally Ferns Barnes looks to the future

In advance of International Women's Day, we celebrate one of the Irish food industry's legendary pioneers, Sally Ferns Barnes of Woodcock Smokery, who talks about finding a home in West Cork, educating a new generation of artisans and passing on traditions

Sally Ferns Barnes moved to West Cork in 1975, becoming a fisherwoman and rearing two daughters while her former husband, a commercial fisherman, worked at sea. Picture: Paul Sherwood

“I only work with wild fish.” In one simple statement, Sally Ferns Barnes of Woodcock Smokery in West Cork sums up her raison d’etre: hers is the last smokehouse in Ireland that deals exclusively with our diminishing stock of wild fish.

One of Ireland’s most iconic artisan food producers, Ferns Barnes has been much celebrated. She was the first Irish producer to win the Supreme Champion award at the Great Taste Awards in 2006, received a Euro-Toques Craft Award in 2018 for her work in protecting culinary skills and craft and, in 2022, was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Food Writers’ Guild.

Born and brought up in Scotland and Sussex, she moved to West Cork in 1975, becoming a fisherwoman and rearing two daughters while her former husband, a commercial fisherman, worked at sea. 

Starting off by smoking fish in a tea chest in the early ’80s — one way of preserving unexpected gluts — Ferns Barnes taught herself the techniques of the trade through trial and error and lots of experimentation.

Those early learnings are appreciated by the customers who get to taste her superb smoked salmon, as well as other wild fish like haddock and tuna. 

2008, Sally and Jolene Barnes, Woodcock Smokery, Castletownshend, Co Cork. Picture: Gilles Perrin 

She also shares her knowledge with the people who have travelled to The Keep, the on-site workshop where she teaches the traditional skills of filleting, salt-curing, hot and cold smoking that she has acquired over the last 45 years.

For Ferns Barnes, who is a warm and welcoming presence, moving to West Cork felt like coming home. 

“I just melted into the background and I loved it. It reminded me of what Scotland was like when I was a child,” she remembers. “I didn’t like living in England at all, it was very cliquish. It took three months before anyone spoke to me.”

After a childhood that involved lots of moving, she was also determined to put down roots. 

”I’ve been a stranger in communities most of my life and I swore I’d keep children in this place. No chopping and changing.”

It wasn’t easy: “Being a fisherman’s wife is not much fun. I was on my own with all the responsibilities for the children and the homework and the dogs but we were working in the local community and becoming part of it. 

"We were all in the same situation, trading fresh fish for turnips and potatoes.”

Regulations on the menu

Ferns Barnes has always had to adapt to survive. “Working with wild food is incredibly difficult,” she says. 

“You can’t project sales figures, or even know if there will be fish this year. Unfortunately, fishing seasons are set by humans, not when the fish is ready.”

Along with the vagaries of nature, Ferns Barnes has also had to deal with the Irish Government’s ban on drift-net fishing for salmon which decimated the inshore fishing industry and, with it, her main source of wild fish. 

“The drift-netting at sea was banned just after we’d been awarded the Supreme Champion Award at the Great Taste Awards in London in 2006. 

"I was so proud to bring the trophies back to Ireland and thought that the future looked great for the business with that publicity. It was not to be.”

Another issue for Woodcock Smokery, as with many other small producers, is the burden of dealing with prohibitive regulations. 

Ferns Barnes was involved in the artisan food group set up by Myrtle Allen in 2001 in response to fears about EU regulations that were being introduced and has always been vocal about the importance of small producers to a local economy.

This sense of fairness has seen her involved in Slow Food — and its piscine offshoot Slow Fish — for many years. 

It has been my saviour... There are lots of people like me trying to be cognizant of the fact that things are limited.”

Championing the ethos of food that is good, clean, and fair, Slow Food — which is based in Italy — is also responsible for founding the now 20-year-old University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG). 

Ferns Barnes, who has a passion for education and teaching— “I trained for primary-school teaching before I arrived here, so I am going full circle” — has taken in many UNISG students as temporary interns, “teaching them about fishy life…and introducing them to Irish culture, which they love.”

On a more short-term basis, Ferns Barnes’ deep knowledge of fish and the sea is something she shares with visitors and students who come to The Keep for a tasting evening, to do a smoking workshop, or to learn about edibles in the world around them. 

“We’ve always foraged, gathering carrageen moss for coughs, harvested mushrooms in the fields and woods, preserved rowan berries and blackberries. It was part of life and then it became infra dig. 

"Now we educate people on how we used to do things and how we ate before the supermarkets.”

Global reach

'Last year we smoked around 170 fish…, which was grim,' said Ferns Barnes. Picture: Paul Sherwood

Despite her rural coastal West Cork setting, Ferns Barnes’ profile stretches far outside the island of Ireland. Slow Food has named her as one of their Queens of the Sea. 

She works with American eco-travel company Bog & Thunder and, with them, recently completed a New York residency where she participated in an international panel discussion featuring “wild salmon warriors from Alaska to Ireland”.

Renowned food journalist and BBC broadcaster Dan Saladino featured her work in his 2001 award-winning book Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods & Why We Need to Save Them. 

Profiling at-risk food and food culture around the world, Saladino makes the point that wild Atlantic salmon are “a natural barometer of the state of the Earth,” something that Ferns Barnes is acutely aware of. 

“Last year we smoked around 170 fish…, which was grim. The previous year, also grim, there were 248 fish bought. [That’s a big drop] from the times in the 1980s/1990s, when we’d buy around 650 fish each season.”

"We don’t know what’s around the corner. Ours is a very disturbed planet and there’s no food security any more,” points out Ferns Barnes. 

But her work educating young people gives her hope for the future. 

“We need to pass our skills on to another generation who are interested in looking outside and engaging with the planet. Education can bring us back to where we live and an appreciation of what the planet gives to us. But don’t take it for granted,” she says.

“Nature can work if we can butt out and take our greed out of the equation. Just give Mother Nature a chance, and let her sort it.”