€2.2m Kerry home of Cork's Old Head Golf course developer John O'Connor goes up for sale

Donald Trump tried to buy his Kinsale golf course, now 'bullheaded' John O'Connor's Ring of Kerry hideaway fiefdom is up for grabs

One man's determined vision: John O'Connor moved mountains of earth for personal projects in  Kerry and in Kinsale where, once-controversially, he built one of the world's most spectacular golf courses

Ballinskelligs, Ring of Kerry
€2.2 million
Size	760 sq m (8,000 sq ft) -
Bedrooms	6 + 3
Bathrooms	6 + 3
BER	C3/D1

A ONCE bare, rocky Kerry headland became a plant ‘laboratory’ for one of the world’s most dramatically-set golf courses, the uber elite Old Head of Kinsale, played by some of the world’s best golfers and proving a challenge even to the likes of Tiger Woods.

“Boolakeel was a test-bed for what would survive and grow at the Old Head,” says Ben O’Connor, son of the late John O’Connor, the driving force behind the dramatic Kinsale peninsula course, with some of that headland’s golf holes 300’ above sea level, surrounded by precipitous cliffs.

Jutting into the Atlantic, near the edge of Western Europe with ‘next stop America,’ developing a golf course on a weather-lashed former rough grazing farm on thin soil was always going to be a challenge, needing shelter belts and resistance to salt, wind and more wind, and more salt, says Mr O’Connor: he grew up here in Ballinskelligs, watching the subsequent planting both at the Old Head and here, at Boolakeel such as Rosa Rugosa, Hydrangeas, Pampas, Gorses and Heathers take off and thrive.

Force to the fore: a view of the lighthouse at the Old Head of Kinsale Golf Links. Picture Dan Linehan

Bunker-like Boolakeel at Ballinskelligs

Singular focus: The late John O'Connor at the Old Head Golf Club, Kinsale

Attempts by one Donald Trump to buy the Old Head of Kinsale golf course in 2004 and a later second attempt were reported by the course’s developers, brothers John and Patrick O’Connor and confirmed by Patrick’s daughter Lhara who’s CEO of the Kinsale golf enterprise with 21 suites and, famously, much-used helipad. The rebuffed Trump, now second-term US President, subsequently bought Co Clare’s Doonbeg golf resort in 2014.

Who’ll come up trumps in the chance to purchase the loosely-linked, former Kerry home of the late John O’Connor, now that it’s publicly up for grabs?

The sprawling 8,000 sq ft sea-facing house, built in an almost feudal or manorial style around a central courtyard with medieval-style tower and glazed look-out, surrounded by ornamental gardens and rapidly matured mazes of mixed planting, has extensive shoreline, a private beach, slipway and forestry. It’s all on over 40 acres on the route out to Bolus Head from Blue Flag beach-blessed Ballinskelligs, in one of the Ring of Kerry’s most rugged, scenic settings beyond Waterville.

Famously the area, and Skellig Michael in particular, featured heavily in the 2014 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Booleakeel was pressed into service hosting some of the visiting film crew, as well as featuring directly in other shoots. Just last month it was used for the filming of a forthcoming movie, West the Road.

Blessed setting of  water-fronting Ballinskellig's Boolakeel 

Boolakeel House

Great room at Boolakeel

Price-guided at €2.2 million (say, $2.54 million to a US buyer) on launch by estate agent Dominic Daly, and west the road itself is Boolakeel House, designed in stages by architects, initially by John Barker (inc the tower) with Brian Conway responsible for the vast and vaulted kitchen/dining/living ‘great room,’ with just about everything subsequently on a grand scale for its 1990s origins.

Builders included well-known local man Haulie O’Shea, who also did the bar/snug and a staircase in enormous reclaimed timber beams from a Dublin flour mill. In recent years the house (with several feature vaulted A—frame roofs and lookout observatory) has been occupied privately, as well as being a high-end rental, used for the aforementioned film shoots and as a celebrity hideaway. 

It has billed itself as “the Diamond on the Ring of Kerry”, while Ballinskelligs on its doorstop is also a Dark Sky Reserve for other sort of star-gazings, with the noted Cill Rialaig artists’ retreat nearby along Bolus Head.

The overall mix at this stand-out, stand-alone one-off includes lots of land and almost herculean landscaping, as much privacy as anyone might want, waterfrontage, secret walkways and woods, slipway and a beach, a three-bed c 2,000 sq ft bungalow for guests or a gardener, barn/stores. The main house has around 8,000 sq ft, with the bulk at ground level, with up to seven en suite bedrooms; there’s a mix of almost modest-sized rooms and immodest ones, with several staircases, hallways and passageways, gallery, billiard room, library and look out points.

Step up?

Bolus Head beyond Boolakeel

Given its scale, and that it’s over 30 years old, it needs refreshing to meet the tastes and needs of 2020’s multi-millionaire occupiers.

There’s plenty of ground for a helicopter pad, to suit the sort of drop-in buyer who, typically, flits in and out of the likes of the Old Head of Kinsale golf course or, closer to here, to Hogs Head and Waterville courses, at those such as Lahinch, Ballybunion or US President Donald Trump’s own Doonbeg resort further west along the Wild Atlantic Way.

Gardens, complete with dramatic 4,000-plant hydrangea avenues and botanical labyrinths, are Boolakeel’s USP, done by a mix of specialists, at various stages: they include designer Ralph Wickham and John Joe Costin who supplied many thousands of the plants; Cork’s Tom O’Byrne was a consultant on the ecology side as he was also working on the Old Head course planting at the time, along with the late horticulturalist, Seamus O’Brien who was, then a young gardener at Glanleam estate on Valentia Island, responsible for its sub-tropical fernery. He later became Head Gardener at the National Botanic Gardens at Kilmacurragh, in Wicklow.

The O’Connor family praise him for “infectious enthusiasm, encouragement and help when, sometimes, we wondered if the project from bare headland to exotic plantings could be done. He was what kept us going.”

The late John O’Connor’s father had owned land and a basic house here out the shoreline past the beach and old abbey since the 1970s, and work began on the gardens in 1991, with vast landscaping, creating several lakes and using excavated soil to create banks to be used as wind shelter belts.

A team of eight workers built the walls, laid enormous stone slabs and created dolmen-like structures; irrigation pipes were laid and plants were sourced from nurseries in Italy, arriving in a series of container lorries from 1992 onwards; a huge glasshouse, decommissioned in the Netherlands, was reconstructed by the house.

A lot of property

There’s a mix of exotic gardens, with collections from all over the world, including South America, the Canaries, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, and the evolution continues along with rewilding with Irish natives by the several lakes, one of which has a virtual cataract of overflow in winter to the sea.

Originally based in London where he’d built up property interests, John O’Connor and family came to Kinsale and Boolakeel by 1996, with son Ben recalling growing up there with a free-range outdoor childhood, with beach access, woods and wonders, dogs, and fishing.

 “For an outdoor person, it’s hard to beat,” he says, adding “I quit golf at age 11, having started at four and only took it up again in my 20s!” 

Selling Boolakeel, - clearly one of his father’s strong passions - brings sadness, admits Ben O’Connor, himself recently a father to a baby boy but it needs new life now and filling too as the sort of property that can only be created by lots of money, as well as drive and determination and, occasionally, risking being divisive.

Speaking at John O’Connor’s Kerry funeral in June 2013 Ben described him as “a strong, bull-headed character with a heart of gold.” Clearly, in the case of both Boolakeel and the Old Head, bull-headedness also went with bulldozing, both literally and metaphorically.

Nights at the round table?

: Individual, idiosyncratic and a true one-off, interest is expected from the US primarily, as well as from the diaspora, says selling agent Dominic Daly. Its uniqueness may also lure a buyer from closer to home given everything that has been added, by a singular vision, with imagination, hard graft, and the passage of time.