Watch: Rathpeacon House is a pocket-sized Georgian gem
LOOK down and around you, and walk the land or take the shade under old hardwood trees and blossoming chestnut trees along its lengthy, private avenue, and you are in pure countryside.
Look up, and look out over the valley, just outside Blackpool and you’re almost in the city, with Fair Hill, Churchfield and Hollyhill away to the west, over the N20, on high, while its back boundary is the rail line into and out of Cork, with which this property has a particularly apt historical connection.
This is where you’ll find Rathpeacon House, a lovely little pocket-sized Georgian double-bay house, on the edge of the city above a road to Killeens and the cusp of changes, surrounded by its own rich and fertile lands — some 77 acres of it — and which is the significant underpinner of its €2.45m price guide, as it comes to market as an executor sale.
It was, for decades, the family home of siblings John and Margot Murphy, well-known cattle dealers in previous years, who moved here from Mishells near Bandon, and these lands were used for holding cattle from all over Co Cork, bought at marts and set for the boat to England.
Their ‘adopted’ home now comes for sale after the death of Margot Murphy last autumn, shortly after a car crash near Innishannon, having been predeceased by her brother John by about two decades.
Since the brother and sister moved here, in simpler times when cattle could be driven to the city docks from these fields, the city has inched out to meet their farm holding, and with its inclusion in the Cork City boundary extension, more changes can be expected.
Some of its fields are bounded by the Cork-Dublin/Mallow rail line, and therein lies a story of mid 19th century engineering enterprise, which helped put the country on a path to prosperity....thanks to a one-time resident of this very Rathpeacon House (there are two Rathpeacon Houses, by way, how Irish, how very Cork.!).
Although much of its long pedigree is quite undocumented, Griffith’s valuation records it as having been lived in by a William Le Fanu in the mid 1800s, leasing it from a Richard Thomas.
And, a quick few Google searches unearth that the same William Le Fanu came to Cork in his 30s, apprenticed to engineer John MacNeill who was later knighted for his role in developing the Irish railways.
Son of a reverend/chaplain and a brother of the Gothic novelist and penner of top drawer ghost stories Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, William Le Fanu worked on many rails lines, including the Great Southern and Western Railway.
In Famine years in 1846 he was resident engineer in charge of the completion of the Cork terminal of the railway, and in the 50s oversaw extensions from Mallow to Killarney, Tralee and Fermoy, as well as being engineer to the Cork and Bandon Railway Company, whose rail line would have passed the spot and crossed the River Bandon close to where ‘his’ Rathpeacon House’s last resident Margo Murphy was involved in that 2017 road smash.
As well as having fields running to the rail line, and with frontage to two roads, Rathpeacon House’s lands are very close to the Gateway Business Park (home to DHL) and North Point Business Park, early and very successful business parks developed by John Cleary Developments between the old and new Mallow Road.
Land almost abutting some of these 77 acres is already home to logistics, distribution and farm machinery businesses, so it’s a racing certainty that some development and speculative interest may surface in this sale, with an eye to future zonings.
This week, Rathpeacon House gets a formal launch with estate agent Roseanne De Vere Hunt, who’s head of Sherry FitzGerald’s Country Homes, Farms & Estates division, and she’s backed up by Ray O’Neill and Con O’Neill of Sherry FitzGerald O’Neill in Clonakilty and Skibbereen, keeping a West Cork link with the late owners’ family.
Utterly private, and reached via an electric gate by a gate lodge and from there by a long, gently ascending tree-fringed avenue, the three-bay house faces south and west, backed by a lofted stone coachhouse directly behind, which is overlooked by a graceful, tall arched window on the stair return.
To the side are vegetable and herb gardens, with old stables and tidy outbuildings, and the view is both pastoral and, disconcertingly in the distance, outer suburban.
The house itself, a sort of ‘gentleman’s farm residence’ of its day, is well kept, but last upgraded some decades ago, with a now-dated decor, dash facade and PVC double glazing: yet, even simple alterations would bring back more of its original grace.
It has high-celinged reception rooms left and right of the central hall, and the one to the right has the most elegant dark, polished stone fireplace, and behind the other drawing/dining room is a kitchen/breakfast room with wide service hatch between front and back rooms, all in a simple floor plan. There’s also a side/back hall, guest WC, and overhead via an attractive staircase with original curving polished hardwood bannister are four bedrooms, plus main bathroom (very 70s in style), separate WC and walk-in hotpress.
Joys are the setting, amid old trees, oaks, chestnut, beeches, maples, rhodos, azaleas and currently in spring freshness, with such proximity to the city. The city’s a longish walk or a short drive (cattle did it, to the boats on the quays, says estate agent Ray O’Neill), and Blackpool and main road and rail links too, with talks of a commuter rail link at Rathpeacon/Monard to Kent station, or points north.
Development too may come down or up the tracks, given such an accessible setting, continuing a path laid down 170 years ago by William Le Fanu.
Rathpeacon House on its present 33 acres is guided by the Sherry FitzGerald team at €1.68 million. A second lot is a 8.8 acre field, adjacent to main section onto the road is guided at €140,000, there’s also an old farm house and farm yard, while lot 4, 35 acres across a road and fronting the Cork-Mallow rail line with ‘hope value’ is guided at €580,000.
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