Charms to set you thinking

Tommy Barker takes an enchanted tour of a charming period property.

ATTRACTIVELY domesticated from its previous decades of use as a parochial house, this river valley-set home is a great place to rear a family. Or livestock.

Think large house with a warm, homely feel and bright rooms. Think six bedrooms, think old stone stables with new roofs, several handy worksheds, think potting house (or think ‘potty house’, one’s an ancient outdoor lavatory), and then think Aga heating and home cooking in the Georgian-era section.

Think almost three acres of ground (2.9 acres is a precise measurement), and then someone will surely think of ponies in the paddocks, and drills of spuds, a private garden and a polytunnel.

Think treehouses (one is already built), woodland walks, salmon in the adjoining river, with fishing permits available. Think all of this, and you may be thinking millions of euros. Think again.

Even a year or two ago, getting a period house package like this under the €1 million mark, within a ten to 15-minute drive of Cork city would have been, well, unthinkable.

New to market and priced to sell at €950,000 via joint agents Savills and Irish and European is the Parochial House at Canon’s Cross – or Cannons’ Cross (see also p1 news story).

At that €950k price, it compares favourably with the range of big, modern one-offs on small sites in the western fringe of Cork’s urban catchment around Ballincollig and Blarney. And, it has the cachet of history, with the sort of wooded backdrop that only grows over centuries.

Near the Inniscarra dam, it has golf, sailing and watersports to hand, as well as vibrant communities and services in Ballincollig, Cloghroe, Inniscarra (with its remarkable community centre and pitches,) Tower and Blarney. A new owner could come from near, the city or farther away, as this former parochial house comes under the ‘country-lite’ banner for those used to city life and street lighting.

It has had careful, domestic ministrations since the late 1990s from its well-travelled owners, whose career in British Foreign Service saw tenures in Tehran, Paris, New Delhi, Bonn, Lima and Mexico city – but who always called Cork home.

With a retirement of sorts beckoning in 1997, they bought Inniscarra’s Parochial House, then in quite poor shape, and spent more on renovations than on the then purchase price. Sensitively done, it has all the creature-comfort essentials, but none of the bling of the Celtic Tiger decade when they did the work. Think music stands, and lots and lots of bookshelves, rather than flat screen TVS in the loos.

There’s as much, or as little, as you’d want to do whiling away the hours in the grounds’ mixture of pasture and woodland, it can be made and kept all neat and tidy, or it will look just as happy with a bit of overgrowth and patina of age.

The house is close to the middle of the site, with the entrance at the road junction facing Cloghroe (a convex mirror wouldn’t go astray on exiting). The house itself is screened from the road by old trees such as a Spanish oak. and then, all to the other side and back is very old woodland, much of it owned by the Colthurst family of the Blarney Estate. It’s all shades of fresh greenery right now, though one of the owners favours “the tracery of the trees in the valley in winter.

Built in different eras, from the Georgian rear to its Victorian front (the conserved Victorian sash windows have unusual glazing patterns, with some two-over one and three-over one panes, with delicate glazing bars) there’s well over 3,000 sq ft of living space, with four reception rooms, with the two best ones (each c21’ by 16’) to the front, with double aspects, high ceilings and period fireplaces.

There are four bedrooms (one en suite) in front, off the generous stepped landing which shows the house’s size to best advantage), with two more behind, and then of the return is a modern bathroom, and separate, sunny WC with two windows looking over the courtyard - one of the best seats in the house.