You can own a 157-acre island in West Cork for a cool €6.75 million

If Celine Dion and Johnny Depp can own their own island, why not you? Time to Castaway, to your own West Cork Love Island

Sat, 16 Jun, 2018 - 01:00

If Celine Dion and Johnny Depp can own their own island, why not you? Time to Castaway, to your own West Cork Love Island...

The Lotto adverts make a big play out of the chance to buy and own a private island, and probably rightly so, as they generally don’t come cheap. Just at the roll call of those who’ve set themselves adrift in the seas, or even in lakes, totally surrounded by water, lords of all they survey (mostly, it seems to be a male thing, although Celine Dion owns an island near Montreal which she listed for sale in 2012 for €29m).

There’s the likes of Richard Branson, and his Necker Island; Charles Haughey, back in the day at Inishvickillaune; The Barclay Brothers in the Channel Islands; the one-time private island of the late Greek shipping billionaire Aristotle Onassis, Skorpois, sold to a Russian billionaire for $153 million, while Roman Abramovich has bought a St Petersberg island to site a €400m art gallery.

Other island hopers and hoppers include Johnny Depp, who said Marlon Brando sold him on the idea of island ownership; Mel Gibson near Fiji; the Emir of Quatar in Greece; magician David Copperfield in the Bahamas, J-Zee and Beyonce went island shopping five years ago in the fruitless hunt for privacy, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison was reported to have spent €500m-€600m on an island in Hawaii. Let’s hope an oracle alerts him to any volcano activity.

Closer to home, Irish Egyptian entrepreneur and businessman Nadim Sadek (who was in a series of the TV show the Secret Millionaire) did a remarkable, world-class €11m investment on Inishturkbeg Island in Clew Bay, which later was an uncomfortable sale at ‘just’ €2.5m, while international ‘lateral thinker, writer and philosopher Edward deBono once owned a West Cork island, one of the Skeams in Roaringwater Bay, which he had bought from US artist James Turrell.

And, then there’s Horse Island, also in Roaringwater Bay just off the mainland shoreline, which has an impressive array of facilities and resources, including four sandy beaches, a private marine licensed 150ft pier and slip,a boathouse, seven private houses, farm, gym, saunas, tennis court and heli-patch. It was assembled over two or three ownerships, most notably by the German inventor and fitness expert Gert Kolbel, whose isometric bodybuilding device, the Bullworker, sold over nine million units over nearly 50 years.

Now, a herd of cattle graze on the Bullworker inventor’s one-time 157 acre private

Cork island, which Kolbel sold around the 2007s to a Dublin-based banker and financier, Adrian Fitzgibbon. He has used it for family holidays, as a farm enterprise, and had plans for an Irish island-based distillery shot down in 2014 after locals on the mainland objected. Fitzgibbon later backed spirited plans for a distillery on Cape Clear.

Now, after a decade of family ownership, the entire of Horse Island is once more on the open market: it’s listed with joint agents Ron Kruger of international agency Engel & Volkers, and Callum Bain of Colliers International. Both men are expected to fish in deep-pocketed enclaves, globally, for Horse Island’s next owners, as they guide it and its seven well-kept houses at a cool €6.75 million. Lotto sums, indeed.

How do you value an island, in any case? They’re either an absolute indulgence, or a logistical teaser, posing questions of transport, access and services. But, for the right buyer, at the right time, it’s a chance to be Lord and Master (sorry, Celine Dion) of all one surveys, and there’s much to survey at Horse Island, and to appreciate its long history, and even industrial/mining past.

When first offered by Kolbel back around 2000, Horse Island had a €6m guide, and it was unofficially reported to have sold for €4-5 million in ’07, but there’s no register or record to confirm what it made. It had been privately offered of late, via Savills, at €7m-€8m, and the price drop has brought with it a change of agents who had been asked not to market it online.

By local comparison, the far smaller and adjacent West Skeam island, on 33 acres with three dwellings, has been for sale for Irish owners since 2013, guiding €1.5 million, via Charles P McCarthy in Skibbereen.

Horse Island is one of Carbery’s 100 Isles’ largest, after the inhabited Cape Clear, Sherkin, Heir Island and Long Island, and which probably have a few hundred year-round inhabitants between them.

In its Victorian hey-day, Horse Island had c 100 year-round occupants and dozens of dwellings, with the men working a number of mine shafts for high quality, valuable copper ore which was exported to Swansea by the West Cork Mining Company, who operated out as far as the Mizen peninsula.

Horse’s human population rose to a peak of 137 in 1841, and the island’s last permanent resident, Paddy McCarthy, left, for nearby Rossbrin on the mainland in 1965 and was memorably interviewed for an island series for this paper by Irish Examiner journalist Dan McCarthy earlier this year.

On the right tides, Horse Island is easily reached, by boat from any number of small piers and slips along the rocky and indented coastline of West Cork, with the nearest being at the postcard pretty cove at Dereenatra, by Rossbrin, while there’s also a pier, slip and boatyard at Rossbrin by the castle. At certain low, spring tides (twice in each lunar month), a sandbar has traditionally allowed the chance to walk/wade cattle to the mainland by Rossbrin.

Rossbrin’s sort of halfway between Schull and Ballydehob, reached off ribbons of winding, hilly and often narrow roads, decked with blossom at this time of the year, and the hinterland is home to some very private, extremely wealthy individuals, heirs and heiresses to fortunes, from international backgrounds, while actor Jeremy Irons’ own peach-hued restored Kilcoe Castle is visible a few miles in along the bay.

If even two of these clued-in, appreciative and generally private windswept blow-in ‘locals’ can be cajoled into bidding on Horse Island, the race may indeed be on, hope selling agents E&V’s Ron Kruger and Colliers’ Callum Bain.

The big appeal, of course, to a certain cadre of buyer is the chance to own an entire island, and it’s not a small one, even by international standards, with 157 acres in all, running up hill and down knolls among disused cottage ruins, down to the craggy and much indented shoreline, with small grassy roads and pathways scythed (actually cut by tractor) between fields of pasture, and verdant ditches and rampant flora and fauna, of unintensively cultivated land, effectively organically managed.

There are currently no cars on the island (which has a permanent caretaker couple, keeping it all tickedy-boo, farming it, overseeing the infrastructure that includes two 88kVA and one 30kVA diesel-powered generators, three very deep bore wells, and several whirring windmills, and operating the fast RIB for access) with electric golf carts, or shanks’ mare, used for mobility along its length, and across its breadth.

Efforts to raise a herd of precious, demanding Wagyu cattle were initiated here, but not satisfactorily progressed, and when the aims of having an island-based distillery were knocked back, any plans to grow barley also fell by the wayside. But, sheep and cattle have been grazed, and there’s a very good standard farmyard, sheds and maintenance buildings in the island’s core, where there’s also a wired-in tennis/basketball court.

Horse Island’s current owner Adrian Fitzgibbon did the finishing work to the main, almost modest-looking but utterly capacious c 4,500 sq ft main house, sensibly built in a courtyard style (pic,left) in three blocks, with central sheltered entertaining area with BBQ, pizza oven, and stores.

It’s all extremely comfortable, has up to or over six bedrooms across its wings, and the feature is a stunning kitchen/dining room with bar height, stand-up-to central island, all with extraordinary views, and yacht-style teak floor, plus a double height living space, 45’ long and fully glazed on one side, so big it has fireplaces/stoves at either end, and a galleried mezzanine and look-out above, while the master suite has a walk-out balcony for night sky gazing, and day-time coast watching.

It’s laid out for entertaining on quite the lavish scale too, and a photo on the fridge reveals a family big event, when tables were formally laid inside for 80-100 dining guests, who’d stayed in bell-tents, or in some and all of the six other dwellings, loosely described now by the owners as “the new village.” That diverse village ‘cluster’ (and in fairness, they are well separated out, and most rooms in each have beach and coastal views) comprises three three-bed houses, two two-bed houses, and a one-bed.

They are all full of character, bone dry, fully and comfortably furnished, with stoves and fireplaces, most have electric heating as well (powered by generators). Most have sympathetic stone clad exteriors, under slate roofs, with well-kept teak external joinery and windows (stone from Horse Island was also used in 1827 to build St Barrahane’s Church of Ireland in Castletownshend, designed by architect James Pain, one of West Cork’s most elegant and stunningly-sited buildings.)

As a quirk, a winsome wood-framed cabin/romantic love shack is set in a sand dune overlooking Horse Island’s biggest and best beach, looking like the wrecked back of a small Spanish galleon, possibly a memento of the times when its German owner Gert Kolbel rented out houses here at up to €1,800 a week in seasonal peak, when Horse Island was made to work its passage.

There’s probably a novena of nine Irish isles called Horse Island, and this horse of a heathery hue in the West Cork archipelago lines up with Carthys Isles, Castle Island and Long Island, the Skeams and Cunnamore on the mainland, and would have formed one long jutting, rock peninsula until sections between them were submerged, so and they now form more individual, often inhospitable, insular personalities.

Launching the mostly-tamed Horse Island to island lovers near and far-flung, Kinsale based Ron Kruger of Engel & Volkers says it’s sizeable, and stunning, and generally easily reached by a short boat ride with well-established mainland communities in the diverse West Cork nearby (think Skibbereen, Baltimore, Ballydehob and Schull,) and about 90 minutes from Cork city and international airport.

“Horse Island is probably the best redeveloped and revitalised of all the islands off the west coast of Ireland,” points out Mr Kruger, adding that “it is one of only a few Irish islands that is fully developed and fit for permanent residential habitation, self-sufficient with regard to electricity, water and waste treatment.”

The current owners upgraded and extended the pier and slipway so that it can take several craft in safety, while the secure boathouse/store is bedecked with wet suits, lifejackets, boards and boating bits and pieces, and a not inconsiderable amount of bed linen given the 20 bedrooms, testament to a place that has given much enjoyment while in low-key, private, family hands.