Coastal cottage ticks all the right boxes

EXPECTING Easter weekend drive-bys and renewed viewings is West Cork estate agent and surveyor John Kerr, whose survey of this seaside home includes the picturesque descriptive word ’haggard.’

This is a package for pragmatic dreamers and romantics, the elusive package of stone farmhouse, stone outbuildings, half acre plot, views and southerly aspect, beach to hand, and city and airport an hour away.

It’s a total renovation and make-over job, of course, and hasn’t been lived in for some time, but the potential is screamingly obvious, to anyone who’s climbed over the roadside gate and into the sun-trap yard, especially.

This package was quietly enough on the market last year, at a higher price, but had boarded up windows and Stygian internal darkness.

Now, Mr Kerr has had the vendors open it up to the light, and with a price guide now at €200,000, he feels its selling season has come.

Location is 100 yards above the stony beach at Ballinglanna, on a dip on the coastal fringe road out from Clonakilty back towards Dunworley, close to Barryroe and Courtmacsherry, and with a year-round community in occupation as well as summer swells.

“It may be difficult to find another coastal jewel which ticks all the boxes of West Cork location, a setting with bay views and so much potential to put a new owner’s own aesthetic stamp on such a property,” says Mr Kerr.

Right now, this Ardgehane cottage has a small porch entrance, two ground floor rooms and three rooms overhead, plus adjoining single storey outbuilding, and two other low-slung separate stone buildings framing the yard or haggard, making for a great sense of enclosure. Guest cottage or art studio, anyone?

It all needs spending, and ideas and quite a few euros more to realise, but the locality has plenty of good examples of cluster renovations to sample.

VERDICT: Chocs away: time for a tempting Easter drive down west?