‘Bendhu’ is the last house on the right, overlooking the sandy cove on the winding road down to Ballintoy Harbour. This eccentric, original and intriguing house was the creation of  Newton Penprase who originated from Cornwall,  he came to Northern Ireland as a young man and taught at the Belfast College of Art.

The house was named after Bendhu or Bendoo the nearby headland that looks across Boheeshane Bay to the limestone headland of  Larry Bane.

The house was started in 1936 and he continued working at it long after his retirement in 1953, in fact it became known locally as 'the house that was never completed' and lots of local stories and theories abounded about why, for  just when it looked like it had reached its conclusion Newton would find another view or creative idea for his home.

The house is timeless, a wonderful construction, built entirely by hand from buckets of cement and the work of a trowel in an artist's hand.

Unfortunately an accident forced him to refrain from building in his latter years and  ‘Bendhu’ lay untouched and  without additions for many years. It was sold shortly after his death in 1978 to Richard McCullough and later in 1993 passed to the present owners who have lovingly restored the house and continues to live with and refine 'Bendhu' in a tradition that I am sure Newton would have approved of.

As a teenager I was fascinated by' Bendhu', every time I passed by on my way down to the harbour with my uncle it would fire my imagination, it intrigued me like a castle, the sculptures,  the contrast between it and all the other houses, the freedom in which it was being built  without a final shape on paper.  Later in life I had the good fortune of looking inside  'Bendhu'  several times when delivering a bottle of calor gas from the local store in Ballycastle.