Heritage - Built in Stone, Rooted in History
The Stone Barn
I am passionate not only about farming and the natural environment, but about saving our old built environment too - the stone buildings, the cobbled yards, the ancient field boundaries that have shaped this landscape for centuries.
At De Gud Farm, the most visible expression of that commitment is our 200-year-old stone barn, which stands at the heart of our entrance yard. In 2025, with the support of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, and the Heritage Council of Ireland under the Traditional Farm Buildings Grants Scheme, we undertook a full restoration of the barn's failing east wall. The work was carried out by Ralph Pickles, a master stonemason living in Minane Bridge who trained at York Minster and spent his career in heritage conservation with the National Trust in England before settling here in County Cork. Ralph rebuilt the wall using traditional lime mortar - the same material used when the barn was first constructed. A timber window bearing its original pink colour was salvaged and restored. Those details had been hidden for generations. They are visible again now.
I dream that this building will be standing in another two hundred years. It deserves to be.
The Ditches
It is estimated that there are 830,000 kilometres of ditches - hedgerows - spread across Ireland. They have taken hundreds, if not thousands, of years to build. They are what make the Irish countryside look the way it does, and what people travel from all over the world to see. At De Gud Farm we regard our ditches as living heritage - ancient boundaries that are also thriving wildlife corridors, home to hawthorn, ash, oak, blackthorn, and the birds and mammals that depend on them. We do not cut them unnecessarily, and we never remove them.
Nearly Four Hundred Years in Cork
The Good family have been farming in County Cork for nearly four hundred years. Our connection to this particular part of Cork - the parish of Tracton, the townlands around Minane Bridge and Nohoval - stretches back through generations of farmers and ordinary working people who shaped this landscape alongside their neighbours.
Barry Good's father Bob purchased this farm at Ballinvologe in 1963 and farmed it with energy and generosity. Barry took over in 2009. Today, the sixth generation of Goods in the parish of Tracton are growing up on this farm - Barry and Lorraine's daughters Sienna and Serena, who are learning from their earliest years to understand and care for the wildlife, the land, and the living heitage all around them. In time, they will become the next in a long line of Good family farmers to be the guardians of this place.
De Gud Farm. Good by Nature.