Antiquity never looked so good or so big

FOR around the price of a decent red-brick southside Dublin family home, a house hunter prepared to travel can pick up a fully restored country estate-type house on acres of ground with out-buildings, pond and a business as well.

Fortsingleton House is a fine old Georgian country seat, in the heart of tranquil Co Monaghan countryside, just of the N2 near Emyvale, putting it within an hour’s drive of Belfast, and a couple of hours from Dublin.

But, pricewise, it is a world away from either of those two cities, with a 700,000 guide quoted by Nancy Donlon of Gunne auctioneers in Monaghan.

It has been owned since 1991 by Ray and Anne Goodall, who acquired it as a derelict property that had housed farm animals and who nursed it back to a state of some grandeur with flagstone floors, working shutters, fine marble fireplaces and decorative friezes and cornices.

The couple have run it as a country house for guests but are now themselves retiring, and say the tranquility has attracted some well- known musicians and diplomats, but they’re too discrete to name names.

Fortsingleton has 14 individually themed bedrooms, 12 with en suite bathrooms. The house has over 8,500 sq ft of space, including two reception rooms, conservatory, breakfast room, kitchen with oil fired and gravity fed Aga/quarry tiled floor and beamed ceiling, ballroom. Features include Georgian and Victorian fireplaces and a cut-stone cantilevered staircase.

The house was once part of an estate of 4,500 acres dating back to the early 1700s, when the Singleton family from Enniskillen bought it from Lord Blaney. The family link ended in 1840, when Singleton Grove was bought by a Scotsman who changed its name to Fortsingleton, and the estate was divided up and sold off in the 1920s.

Fortsingleton’s antiquity is hinted at by the old tower section at a gable end, and not all of the property’s grandeur is internal.

The property mix on offer includes courtyard buildings, partly renovated, such as lofted and cut stone outbuildings and a stable block, a re-roofed cut stone coach house , a stone walled kitchen, all on six acres of private rounds which also include a small woodland area, small lake and a gazebo.

Fortsingleton is within the price reach of a number of buyers from Dublin who have valuable homes from which to trade up, and it could be bought just as a private home with lots of space, or as a going concern.

“There’s great scope for someone younger to take on the place and run it, and finish converting the courtyard buildings,” said vendor Anne Goodall, whose husband Ray, an engineer by profession, oversaw all of the renovations to date.