Craft workers’ pride

Tommy Barker surveys a ready-to-go haven for new occupants.

ONCE a year, the lady of the house that is Mount Juliet, would leave what is still one of the country's greatest estates in her Rolls Royce, depart via Mount Juliet's Killarney Gates, and be driven for the traditional December 8 shopping day out, passing this farmhouse in the process.

The McCalmont family, most notably Major Donal McCalmont and his wife Bunny, owned Mount Juliet from 1914 to the late 1980s a long stretch of time, during most of which this farmhouse/cottage spent going into gradual decline.