A supper club in Connemara

In the fading gloam of a stormy evening there’s a gorse-yellow glow from the little stone cabin. Reached by a festoon-lit wooden walkway that curves through lichen-covered trees, this is the booley at Fernwood, a family-run organic farm with three guest cabins and a wooden sauna on the edge of a salt lake in the heart of Connemara, on the Atlantic coast of County Galway. Inside, tables are set with daffodils, the wood burner is keeping it toasty and This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads is on the speakers.

The booley – the reimagining of a ramshackle hut that stood here before Ireland was first officially surveyed in the 1800s – is the setting for a new supper club, called Gather. The building was lived in by a farmer and his animals until the 1960s, but then nature slowly started to creep in.

Like everything at Fernwood, owned by Anne and Simon Ashe, its restoration is the result of a locally rooted, light-touch approach. The timber beams are from trees felled in 2025’s Storm Éowyn and were crafted by a carpenter who lives across the bog. A stonemason who grew up beside Anne’s grandmother painstakingly reconstructed the original brickwork. The walls are plastered in cork and lime, and the doorstep is imprinted with ferns cast in concrete by local artist Paddy O’Malley.

On Gather’s launch night, chats spark up over cocktails of Valentia Island Vermouth (made with wild botanicals from the coast of County Kerry). At a long narrow table a Dutch writer of fantasy novels, who lives up the road in Leenaun, recounts how she first came to Ireland as a film student many decades ago. She drove around in a camper van and ended up on the remote Donegal island of Tory after hitching a ride with a local fisherman. The documentary she made about life there became her final thesis.

In the seat across from her, the farmer who grew the pink fir apple potatoes now crisping up on the barbecue outside says his two greatest passions in life are salmon fishing and mushroom foraging.

As easy conversation and craic plays out over snacks of Sicilian chickpea fritters and great salty chunks of focaccia, Anne couldn’t have imagined a better start to an evening focused on community. At a small table by the fire is the woman who ran the restaurant down the road in Clifden where Anne got her first job as a teenager. She’d pick vegetables from the garden to wash for the cook before changing into her waiting uniform to serve them.

Gather marks the first time chef Katie Sanderson and her partner Jasper O’Connor are back in the kitchen together since Dillisk, their sellout 2015 pop-up. At this raved-about restaurant in a Connemara boat shed belonging to Jasper’s parents, fish plucked from the Atlantic was cooked in tandoors and dishes were peppered with seaweed foraged from the shore.

Their new project is timely. “It’s taken 10 years to get to this point,” says Katie. “It feels as if it’s come full circle.” The couple spent much of the past decade growing their White Mausu chilli oil business from a market stall to a cult brand stocked in 12 countries. It has a loyal fanbase: Michel Roux Jr always has a jar of their black bean rāyu in his cupboard, Jay Rayner calls the peanut version “a banger” and Darina Allen is “addicted”.

The kitchen is a happy place for Katie and Jasper – it’s how they met, both working in the Fumbally Café in Dublin where there was “flirty energy in the air”. They had a common connection to Connemara as Jasper is from Galway city and Katie grew up in Hong Kong, but spent every summer back on the west coast of her mother’s native Ireland, roaming wild and picking blackberries.

Now living a pebble’s throw from the Dillisk boat shed, they are serving dishes at Fernwood that percolated as they entertained friends at home at weekends, using brilliant local produce and gradually logging the hits: a crunchy taco topped with Cleggan crab spiced up with kimchi; Killary mussels in a Pernod and guanciale sauce; Fernwood’s fall-apart leg of wether lamb with pearl barley and garden herbs.

For Katie, cooking with others in a restaurant is “like being on a pirate ship”. You don’t really know how it’s going to go, but you’re all in it together. She and Jasper relish the intensely social aspect, while by contrast, running a successful food brand can be screen-based and solitary. Yet that success has allowed them the scope to return to the kitchen and the opportunity, says Katie, “to play” alongside their friends and “powerhouses” Anne and Simon, whose “magic hands just get things done”.

As an immersive stay after the supper club feast, Fernwood’s tucked away, solar-powered Stilt House has a minimalist Japandi aesthetic, with a crisply made bed topped with forest-print cushions and a curved inner wall of green-stained wood that seems to trace a giant trunk. There’s a log-fired outdoor tub on the deck for bathing like a woodsman, a constant soundtrack of rustling branches and twittering birds (the dawn chorus here is particularly boisterous) and free-range eggs up by the farm gate to cook for breakfast.

The vegetable garden, meanwhile, is ripe for picking for self-catered suppers. Cross the rope bridge over a rushing river to explore trails through the woodland, where Anne and Simon gather acorns each year to replant. Fernwood is home to every native Irish tree except yew and aspen (although Simon can tell you exactly where singular examples of the latter are growing elsewhere in Connemara, in craggy crevasses out of the reach of hungry herbivores). Or follow the path to the sauna, where the circular window frames a spyglass view of the salt lake and the scudding clouds, and the icy plunge pool is fed by freshwater.

An honest-to-goodness celebration of local growers and makers, Gather and Fernwood are a snapshot of the cultural dynamism of Connemara right now, as a lightning in a bottle pop-up and a smartly considered sustainable tourism model that’s putting down roots for future generations.

The Clock Barn, North Yorkshire

When east London restaurateur James Ramsden moved to Ripon he started a pop-up series in an old cow barn. The quarterly menu might include braised hogget with pearl-barley risotto and wild garlic salsa verde (clockbarnsc.com).

Knepp, West Sussex

A safari immersion into rewilding (spot free-roaming longhorn cattle and Tamworth pigs) combined with a communal lunch at the newly Michelin green-starred kitchen, via a charcuterie tasting in the zero-waste butchery (knepp.co.uk).

Fire Made, Somerset

Working from their studio kitchen in Westcombe Dairy, husband-and-wife team Ana Ortiz and Tom Bray teach wood-fired cooking masterclasses. Diners might help prepare hung fore ribs before feasting outside (firemade.co.uk).

Gather at Fernwood runs every Thursday until the end of May. To book the supper club or to stay, visit fernwood.eco and @fernwood_farm