The colonisation and suburbanisation of Cork’s suburban Ballinlough has pretty much come to a stop, bar some small infill site, since it started its mushroom growth about a century ago, with new estates added by the handful in decades from the 1920s onwards.

“YOU wouldn’t hear a peep here,” says the selling agent of 14 Glencoo Lawn, an already extended three-bed semi-d off Cork’s Boreenmanna Road.