Buy a slice of Churchtown

YOU don’t lightly make the decision to move to Churchtown – people tend to stay.

Actor Oliver Reed, who loved the area, was buried in the north Cork village’s 13th century cemetery, after dying suddenly aged 61 during the making of the movie Gladiator. Maeve Binchy still traces her roots to here, though her great grandfather “left Churchtown in 1849 for the bright lights of Charleville,” she recalls. Legendary horse trainer Vincent O’Brien started his National Hunt career in the area with a string of winners – bagging a Cheltenham Gold Cup with Cottage Rake in 1948, before his subsequent move to Ballydoyle.

This north Cork village treasures its people, and its past, and in fact the book The Annals of Churchtown, which came out in 2005, ran to 260,000 words and 775 pages in length, with an accolade from President Mary McAleese after she’d visited its go-ahead village community’s renewal facilities.