Blue House, Blue House Cottage & Old Forge Garden
at Bauline East, Tors Cove, Southern Shore, Newfoundland
Proprietors:
Judith Robertson and Allan Kathnelson
Sitting in the gentle lap of balsam firs, Blue House and Blue House Cottage occupy the far southeastern edge of the North American Continent on the Southern Shore of Newfoundland. The seaside property is located in Bauline East perched on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Bauline East is a community of Irish descendents who fished, whaled, sealed, and farmed for many generations. Getting there is easy. The outport lies 45 minutes south west of the city of St. John’s and is accessible by the Number 10 or Trans-Canada Highway and Witless Bay Line. Visitors approach through some of the oldest settlements of Newfoundland, including Bay Bulls, Witless Bay, and St. Michaels to arrive in this beautiful community whose settlement dates back 400 years.
Blue House Cottage was built from premium construction materials in 2005 to accommodate friends and family coming to visit. The serene cottage with a soaring cathedral ceiling is equipped with a full bath, double bed, sitting area and a cedar deck with ocean view. The adjacent 1800 square foot main house was purchased by Judith and Allan in 2003 and restored with Roger Colbert. The 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom home has been gently updated to keep true to its original saltbox structure. The lovely main floor great-room is the focal point of the home’s design with exposed pine beams, an old wood-burning stove, and the original wooden staircase leading to the second floor. The master bedroom is equipped with a 4-piece bath, majestic cathedral ceilings, pine clad walls, and a spacious cedar deck overlooking the garden and sea. The home possesses a typical two-storey, centre hall-plan with an ideal view of the garden and shoreline sitting on original wooden foundation posts that pre-date the great tidal wave of 1929.
Blue House has housed a number of famous Newfoundland artists, including Janice Udell. The small main-floor bedroom functioned as the general store for the community in the mid-20th century. A tsunami in the late 1960s wiped out several neighbouring communities that dotted the fiords and fishing villages along the bays and headlands of the Southern Shore. According to Barb, a local resident whose ancestors have lived here for generations, the tidal wave deposited sand in the front door of Blue House. The original house possessed a forge and barn attached to it on the ocean side. Historical maps of the community have variously named it Seal Meadow, Seal Cove, Whale Point, Ferryland, Toad’s Cove, and Bauline East.
A little river running through the property originates in the great rocky barrens of the Avalon.The brook meanders through Old Forge Garden and down to the beach, and frequently offers up good fortune in the shape of horseshoes. These were made long ago in the forge that occupied the leeward side of the property in the late 19th and early 20th century. The forge sat on the path (now the East Coast Trail) used by travellers going by foot from Trepassey, Ferryland, Aquaforte and Cape Broyle to St. John’s.
Blue House and Blue House Cottage sit on a sea-scoured landscape that has long attracted individuals of artistic temperament, who seek the haunting serenity of sculpted rock, sea, sky and sound. It was in this way that—in the summer of 2003—Judith discovered Blue House. She was visiting the Celtic Rendezvous Cottages on the Sea, and wrote:
“I have chosen a harbor, a bay, and a cottage with a balcony in which to stand, to look out across the sea, and to write this introduction. It is early summer in Newfoundland and the Southern Shore is awash with whales and icebergs and kittiwakes, each more palpitant with sound than the next. The view is like a line of poetry that makes itself felt, all blue with sea and sky locked in a lover's embrace at the edges. Four rugged islands rise up, all flushed with pinks and greens. The elongated rhythm of Avalon moves with the sweep of gulls, old, wild, perfectly conceived, and as in the legend, alive once and for all.”
The stretch of shoreline is magnificent around Bauline East—it runs wild and deep in the channel (200 metres), and frigid (cooled by the Labrador current)—teeming with whales breaching, bald eagles, and puffins. The heavy breaking seas of the South East Coast of Newfoundland have claimed for it the name of Graveyard of the Atlantic. The wild waters caress the bones of many ships fallen over time. Great Island (straight out) is part of an archipelago of five ancient islands known as the Avalon Witless Bay Bird Sanctuary—Crown Land given over to rare birds, including puffins, Arctic murres, kittiwakes, seagulls, and others.
Millions of birds return to the islands each season to nest, harbingers of the caplin and whales that follow in July & August. There is lots to do, especially if you book during whale watching season.
The East Coast trail runs through communities hugging the coast from St. John’s to Ferryland, and is splendid for hikes and picnics. The now abandoned settlement of La Manche is accessible by hiking 6 kilometres southwest, just up the hill at Bauline Wharf, along the East Coast Trail. The hike is through serene woods and shore that boast a lovely old suspension bridge, a deep gorge, and shelves of coastal rock exposures whose wave washed remains (once part of Western Europe) date back 550 million years to the opening up of the Atlantic ocean during the cataclysmic continental drift. Dedicated one-time fishers—now small boat operators and ocean kayakers—will take you out to the big islands that serve as bird sanctuaries to rare species of birds, and to Great Island. Close to shore are fabulous lagoon-like caves and shale and sandstone gulches that bring to mind generations of pirates. The islands are symphonic with the operatic melodies of rare birds, and you can draw close to see the nesting of puffins, murres, seagulls and kittiwakes.