Myra Ryall: 'Lockdown gave me time to walk in Ballyhoura and Doneraile, time to use my artistic brain'

Myra Ryall in the outdoor seating area at Townhouse Interiors & Café, Doneraile. Picture Denis Minihane.

“We always said ‘we’ll meet at the gooseberry bushes’,” says Myra Ryall, recalling childhood games with her siblings on the family farm in the foothills of the Ballyhoura Mountains.

When your rendezvous point for childhood play is a fruit bush, it’s a sure bet sustainability is going to be in your bones.

Myra is co-owner, along with her husband, Ray O’Callaghan, of Townhouse Interiors and Townhouse Café in Doneraile, North Cork. “My dream all my life was to reside near my work. I just loved the idea of not having to commute far to work.”

She has fulfilled that dream, living in the house she built 25 years ago at Castlepook, near her home of origin, and working just 4km away right next to Doneraile Park. Having started Townhouse Interiors in Mallow in 2001, Myra and Ray relocated the business to Doneraile in 2011.

Right from the outset, their choices were for sustainability. The three-storey building in which their café and interiors businesses are housed was once The Commercial Hall. “We didn’t buy a new building. We bought to restore. The building dates to the 1800s and is still in commercial use," Myra says.

CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB

It sold top-quality goods in the early 1900s and up to the mid-century – china, furniture, lace, tailoring – it was like the Harrods of London in Doneraile.

Myra says she and Ray “made it a mission” to source furniture that had once been sold at The Commercial Hall and to restore it. “We bought at auctions, in private sales. We restored seating, cabinet sideboards – these saved pieces are in our café where every piece of furniture has been either restored or refurbished in our workshop at Castlepook. So no air miles!”

Myra Ryall, co-owner, in the Townhouse Interiors & Café, Doneraile. Myra is co-owner, along with her husband, Ray O’Callaghan. Picture Denis Minihane.

Now in its eighth year, Townhouse Café has its own bakery, and produce is sourced locally. “Most of our leaves and vegetables come from Kilbrack Organic Farm, so just two minutes to our kitchen door. A lot of our fruit comes from our home gardens in Castlepook – redcurrants, blackcurrants, gooseberries, apples.

“Our coffee granules are from Java, who are carbon-neutral in their factory. We reuse all the spent granules as fertiliser for our plants,” says Myra, adding that Townhouse Café buys small. “There are no big deliveries every week. And because we buy in small quantities, everything in the kitchen gets used. There’s no waste.”

Other sustainable elements at the café range from eco-friendly paint on walls and floors to the use of eco-blocks – made out of sawdust and shavings from furniture shops – in the café’s open fire.

With all curtains sold at Townhouse Interiors made by seamstresses in the Castlepook workshop, Myra spent lockdown coming up with and working on her own capsule collection of curtains. 

Lockdown gave me time to walk in Ballyhoura and in Doneraile Park, time to use my artistic brain.

The collection has two ranges – Parterre and Ballyhoura – and Myra’s choice of names for the fabric colours is a kind of tour of the surrounding North Cork landscapes: ‘Fossil Grey’ is reminiscent of Castlepook Cave, ‘Mammoth Bone’ a reminder of the mammoth bone discovered there in the early 1970s, ‘Boreen’ (“because I live up a boreen”) and ‘Oh Deery Me’ after the three species of deer in Doneraile Park – Silka, Fallow and Red.

Myra is a volunteer tour guide at the 166-hectare Doneraile Park, with its mature groves of deciduous trees and restored water features. She trained as a tour guide – along with other local people – 10 years ago. “We’ve just released the 2022 summer season of our guided garden tours in collaboration with OPW, Ballyhoura Fáilte and Doneraile Drama,” she says.

The costumes worn by the drama group, when they play characters associated with Doneraile Estate’s history (e.g. Queen Elizabeth I, poet Edmund Spenser) for the pageantry aspect of the tour, were made by Myra.

While the guided tours happen monthly from May to October, Myra also gives informal tours to local groups e.g. flower clubs and schools. “Yesterday I spoke about sustainability to a group of 20 students from Davis College in Mallow and I brought them into the gardens,” she says.

Myra Ryall is pictured with some of the organic produce from Kilbrack Organic Farms in the outdoor seating area at Townhouse Interiors & Café, Doneraile. Picture Denis Minihane.

Secretary of Doneraile Tidy Towns – the village is authentically Georgian – Myra reports up to 30 oak trees have been planted on the Charleville approach to Doneraile. “They’re six weeks in the ground,” she says.

Myra’s parents were undoubtedly her sustainability influencers – her late father, William Ryall, “an avid, award-winning horticulturalist who provided vegetables and fruit for market and family” and her sprightly nonagenarian mother, Maureen, who was “totally into flowers”. She recalls her father rising at dawn and bringing his produce to markets in Mallow, Charleville and Kanturk.

“It was a long season. He knew how to manage his plants. Species that’d have been novelties later, he was growing ahead of his time – five or six varieties of runner bean, squashes, vegetable marrows, mushrooms, every variety of cabbage and mixed salad leaves.”

Her father knew the land and she absorbed learnings from him. “Within metres, soil can change, for example from black to sandy. Growing up we had all that knowledge. Sandy soil near streams and rivers was where you grew carrots – we were lucky to have streams through our land.”

Describing her dad as living with a hoe in his hand, she recalls him weeding all day. “Herding the cattle he’d have the hoe with him, so weeding in a sense was never a chore.” She remembers her mother bringing flowers and fermented foods like apple cider vinegar to the shows. 

“They were our influencers, who we got inspired by.”