Locals buy historic 163-acre coastal home in Waterford
Summerville Estate, at Corballymore, Dunmore East, which includes a former stately home, held a guide price of €1.2m.
It was purchased as one lot for an undisclosed sum by “a local family”, according to the selling agents, John Rohan Shelley Fitzgerald.
The agents say the holding had been offered alternatively as six lots, with the Scottish-Colonial style Summerville House, its two-storey gate lodge and out-buildings, with 23 acres, reserved at €175,000. The sale attracted “very strong and varied interest, locally, nationally and internationally”.
Ten minutes from Waterford Airport, the site constitutes a vacant possession of tillage, woodland, and a private beach.
The boarded-up house requires major renovation but the buyer intends restoring it as a family home.
The estate was once the seat of the English Catholic Wyse family, whose Waterford connections date to Norman times and whose lands were seized under Cromwell but returned under the Restoration.
Sir Thomas Wyse, keenly pro-union with Britain but a strong advocate of Catholic Emancipation, engineered the defeat of Lord Beresford in the 1826 election, which inspired Daniel O’Connell to contest the 1828 Clare by-election.
Thomas was himself elected to Westminster where he served between 1835 and 1847. He married Napoleon Bonaparte’s niece, Letitia, in 1821, but the marriage fragmented under Letitia’s infidelity. They had two sons, while Letitia subsequently had three more children. She died in Italy in 1871.
Sir Thomas had engaged Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Pugin — who co-designed London’s Houses of Parliament — to construct Summerville House on the site of the original but demolished Manor of St John’s.
On losing his seat in parliament, he left to serve as ambassador to Greece, where he died in 1862.
In later times the house served as a hotel, but plans to develop it as a major leisure and holiday facility never took off.
