Cover Story: Right at home on the range

Kinsale, Cork €695,000

There’s just one slight drawback to buying Creek Cottage — no matter who you are, or what you do to it, Cork and Kinsale people will always refer to it as “Floyd’s place”.

The larger than-than-life, but now lamentably-late TV chef Keith Floyd who died in 2009 washed up on Irish shores in the 1980s and 1990s, falling for a more laid-back lifestyle in and around Kinsale than he would have been allowed in England, as his publishing and television career gathered hectic pace.

Floyd wasn’t the first man to host TV cookery programmes, but he was the mould-breaker, making it cool for guys to get down and dirty, laddish, bold and slightly tipsy, in the kitchen. Or on a fishing boat. Or in a market. Or in a pub. Or, in Creek Cottage near Kinsale, where he hosted legendary parties, and breakfasts that went so far beyond the Full Irish they could have been described as the Full Floyd.

Back in the 1980s, the bow-tied, genial giant of (making it look easy) TV cooking was invited to Kinsale’s early Gourmet Festivals (having produced Floyd on Britain and Ireland in 1988), and he took to the town with relish and brio, as he did some of the legendary large personalities (with consequent large appetites and thirsts) who populated Kinsale at the time.

By then, the former journalist, soldier and cook had had several successful and failed restaurants (and marriages), but he embraced life in Kinsale with gusto and Gitanes: he got lots of raucous and bohemian enjoyment out of his several years there.

His profile, enthusiasm and energy helped move coastal Kinsale up the visitor charts as well, including making the Kinsale Rugby Sevens a scrum event, from 1993, when he brought over a top Anglo-Welsh team, the so-called Keith Floyd Vikings to play some of Munster’s fledgling heroes.

He developed his Cork home, Creek Cottage, too in the early 1990s, at the water’s edge a mile or two from Kinsale at Belgooly creek, after several attempts to negotiate its purchase with a local farmer/owner of what was then a tiny roadside cottage.

The purchase involved the intervention of fellow chef Billy Mackesy of Bawnleigh House, a bottle of whiskey, a lot of talk and a bible to seal the deal on. This time, Floyd later wrote, was a remove from the falseness (he used another more robust word beginning with ‘bull’ ) of TV and chat shows, he described it as “life with a roaring heart and blood pumping through it”.

He had promised the farmer-owner he wanted to recreate his Somerset childhood at the creek’s litoral setting, with hollyhocks at the front door and a chicken run out the back. He was better than his word: he doubled it in size, and later added a guest cottage/boathouse for visitors with games room, landscaped the acre and a half of grounds, built a pig pen, duck pond, chicken run, stables and sheds, laid out veg and herb beds, and also built several garden barbecue areas to cook all that produce in, to be washed down with copious glasses of red wine, in good, lively company.

It was, according to indiscreet reports, a raucous and a rollercoaster time, but Floyd’s home went to auction in 1997, selling with lots of his personal effects and memorabilia after he had been declared bankrupt in 1996 when his Devon restaurant, The Malsters, folded.

Creek Cottage was then bought by a Dublin businessman as a week-end retreat, and he and his sons for a while ran a boat charter business out of Kinsale as the Celtic Tiger started to spread water-wings. It sold again, in 2001, to its current owners John and Veronica Ferry, who although Irish born (Dublin/Midlands) had lived and worked for years in London and wanted a place to semi-retire to, with sons reared and a younger daughter who made the move to Cork with them.

Veronica Ferry (nee Fitzsimons) recalls the year, 2001, when she drove to Kinsale for the first time ever, and spotted Creek Cottage in the car mirror after she had whizzed past its long, and 10’ high, natural stone boundary wall — erected at considerable cost by Cork County Council when they straightened the road by Floyd’s bolthole.

Veronica had a background in property in London, reckoning “I was the first buyer’s agent there, decades ago, long before Phil and Kirsty,” and decided there and then to buy it. John went along with the notion, but now that they have grandchildren in London, they reckon it’s time to upsticks again, back to the UK.

They’ve had the scenically-set Creek Cottage on the market for a while, and with a newly appointed sales agent Dominic Daly in Cork city on the case, the ‘For Sale’ sign now adds the rider ‘Final offers being accepted’.

It’s guided at €695,000 by Mr Daly, who stresses that it’s a very deceptive mix with considerable further potential on its long, shore-hugging acre and a half. The Ferrys say the local authority had previously agreed in principle to sell them further land left over at the Cork site of the property after the old steel bridge nearby was decommissioned and roadworks completed.

There may be scope, suggests Mr Daly, for further buildings, and maybe even commercial use: tearooms or a café could be a runner, he hints, though a wine bar would be a more fitting re-use in memory of the man who fashioned it in the first instance some 20 years ago.

Dominic Daly describes Creek Cottage as “a well-known, waterfront property with immense opportunities for further development, nine miles from Cork airport and a mile or so from Kinsale.”

Apart from the main, two-bed c 1,200 sq ft home fashioned by Floyd and improved by the current owners, there is what’s called the boathouse, a self-contained building that cleverly manages to encompass three guest or rental units: in the past while, they’ve been earning their keep, making about €1,500 a month in lets to three tenants. Two of the apartments are doubles, one’s a single and they all have a water aspect. The main dwelling is two-storey and dormer, essentially one room wide, and full of charm and character, albeit toned down quite a bit from Floyd’s time here, when it was all dark navy and deep red walls, holding the scent of Gitanes, Gauloises and cigars. Now, it’s more scented candles, fragrant lilies, and Lyric FM.

Floyd’s livestock and especially his geese, have long-departed these shores (100 metres of frontage, by the way) but there’s still great wildlife, and swans are regular callers to the shoreline; there’s still a dovecote, dogs, and cats, and many outbuildings and pens to be repopulated. The gardens and glasshouses are still productive, there’s an orchard section and tomatoes for starters (and for deserts) and a water feature with fountain is mid-ships between the main house and guest cottage/boathouse.

Standing guard over this water feature is a full-size stuffed crocodile, one of two Floyd had repatriated here after travels and shows abroad, and it’s stuffed with aeroboard: Floyd had them moored on the tidal mudflats right in front of his home as a sort of visual, floating joke.

Other Floyd memorabilia remains: the oversize outside barbecues and ovens are still in place, but rusting, while inside the main cooker in the kitchen with its big, industrial sized gas rings, is in daily use still in what’s a quite compact galley kitchen — albeit one that has fed hundreds of guests down the years.

Creek Cottage has at its gable end a triple-aspect living room, with fireplace on the far gable. There’s also a dining room, linking to a sunroom with glazing on three sides, and which is topped with a viewing balcony off the large en suite master bedroom above, and there’s also a small second bedroom upstairs. Most of the ground floor is finished out in hard-wearing thick terracotta tiles. There’s also a rear hall, utility and guest/shower room, there’s central heating, and hardwood windows, some double glazed, some single glazed, and more than a few outdoor spots to sit out at, gaze upon, and sip a glass or few of vin rouge from.

Unlikely really to be a typical family home, given its scattered accommodation (although teens would love the freedom of a separate roof over their heads), Creek Cottage’s several residential elements all look directly across the tidal estuary at a solidly-built old 19th century stone quay wall, used for loading and unloading cargoes, from cereals and coal.

This road opposite, now less travelled, used to lead to the original, hilly Kinsale golf course before that club relocated to a new course at Farrangalway, while the Old Head of Kinsale golf course has added further strings to Kinsale’s bow, and to its beau, the ever-boyish, and roguish, Keith Floyd, who’d kept a large train set in his Creek Cottage retreat, and who died aged 65, not quite fully grown up.

VERDICT: Here’s one Keith Floyd prepared earlier.