Converted schoolhouse has bags of history and is full of potential

ALL roads used to lead to the old school house on south Cork’s coastline.

A half‘n’half property up for sale here, less than a half a mile from the beach and the water’s edge, is steeped in local history. One section was built in 1790, as a chapel for the hinterland, and adjoins an old two-storey farmhouse, and in subsequent years the chapel switched services and became a boys’ school.

When first built, a network of paths linked it to Myrtleville, Fountainstown, Carrigaline and Crosshaven, and its first priest, Fr Callanan, used to come here on horseback from Carrigaline for Sunday and Holy Day masses.

The two adjoining buildings, now with a combined area of around 3,000 sq ft on a site of about a third of an acre, have been in residential use for the last 16 years, but for any new owners it could prove to be highly adaptable. The chapel section could be used as a granny flat and it has two bedrooms and a shower room in situ as well as a living room, lobby and open lofted room above yet to be ‘colonised’.

This thick-walled building also has huge appeal as a studio space, for home office use, for artists, or classes, or if sufficiently reworked, could make for a niche restaurant or other commercial use subject to planning.

The main, more traditional, house section has three more first floor bedrooms, with high ceilings, plus main bathroom, and downstairs there’s a large L-shaped kitchen with sunny patio aspect, hall with exposed stone wall and old timbers, plus a living room with double aspect and cast iron fireplace.

The kitchen opens to an un-completed large utility, which leads back around to useful storage shed/garage/stables: the horse-mad vendors are only leaving to get more space for their daughters’ ponies.

Selling agent for the Old School House, on a pleasant mature site, is Ann O’Mahony of Sherry FitzGerald, who guides it at €550,000. She says there will be huge interest in the sale as the place offers so many possibilities to a range of buyers, in such an attractive rural setting a short drive from the city.