Connemara hideaway

’TIS only small, but the location is perfectly formed.

This 800 sq ft cottage on a small site has a proud €595,000 asking price, and quite possibly will sell for more than that. Location is the key.

The location is Ervallagh, a hideaway at the end of one of the country’s most evocatively beautiful country lanes, at the edge of Connemara and with the Atlantic ranged beyond, with a sandy-beached island just in front as a surf breaker.

Location is a couple of miles out from Roundstone, an almost too-pretty Galway village colonised every summer by wealthy Dublin families, a sort of Dublin 4-on-sea. You could call it G4.

Roundstone is about as close to off-road as many D-registered jeeps and SUVs may ever get to getting dirty, or potholed or suffer a pranged alloy wheel. More than a few of these gas-guzzlers also trail fuel-thirsty RIB boats right across the country for the fortnight’s holidays or the summer relocation.

The Shannon mightn’t yet be drained, but these are the toys to drain Saudi of oil.

And, while the big boys’ RIBs bob at Roundstone pier, perhaps a more appropriately low-key craft for Ervallagh is a curragh, a dinghy, or at the very least an old timber craft.

The narrow horseshoe bay, with its nestling pier, could hardly be more sheltered, and it has a long, flat, sandy beach, stranded each day by the tides – a safe kids’ playground.

There’s only a handful of houses at Ervallagh, a quarter mile in off the Roundstone-Ballyconneely/Clifden road. There are effectively off-road coastal trails back towards Roundstone village in one direction, while Whale Harbour and the white sandy beaches at Gurteen and Dog’s Day are navigable to the north.

Such rhapsodies can turn to dreams fulfilled for some lucky family now, with the offering of an old three-bed cottage here, right by the pier with Boston the next parish west.

Adrian Mangan of Sherry FitzGerald Kavanagh is selling the dream, with the only wake-up call being the €595,000 price tag. He can be confident, though, even in an ebb-market, because other run-down offerings at Ervalagh have made top dollar on the rare occasions they’ve come up.

This cottage offering the chance to live the dream has a living/dining room, with an open fire and views from its small windows, two other bedrooms open to views, and bedroom three is an attic space.

The house can be bought “as-is”, and holidayed in immediately, while wealthier buyers might hope to enlarge at Ervallagh, though the site size is small – but perfectly, exquisitely placed.

Landscape artists like Kenneth Webb love Ervallagh and this corner of the west – take it at your easel.