Make a pitch for a ‘Croker’ of your own

A LOT of house, a lot of history (try 250 years!), and a good modicum of land comes with Lisnabrin house at Curraghglass, near Tallow in west Waterford.

And, while you’ll get the 1760s-built, three-storey, 9,000 sq ft ‘real deal’ Georgian residence on 25 acres for around its €750,000 guide price, unfortunately the spending won’t stop there: you’ll need to have quite a few hundred thousand euro more to bring it back to shining elegance.

It was the seat of the Croker family from Cromwellian times, where a blow-in Colonel Croker married the Catholic daughter of the Coppinger family who’d been in residence and who’d tended him, ensuring harmony and a continuation of the blood line as well.

Right now, the large rambling home shows more than a few signs of faded glory, but its bones are good, and its architectural features — sash windows, diocletian and Venetian windows over the fan-lit door, shutters, architraves, fireplaces are more or less intact and in situ.

Selling agent for the period property buy is Roseanne DeVere Hunt of Knight Frank in Dublin, who says the land is currently in tillage, but could easily enough revert to pasture should new owners want to keep horses — a small stud farm could be viable, she says, given the Blackwater Valley cachet and proximity to Tipperary and Cork city.

It’s a property that might over the coming months come to feature in Irish Thoroughbred Marketing’s new drive announced this week to promote Ireland as a premier country for the bloodstock industry, with marketing to include country property.

To the side and back of the five-bay house are a mix of attractive cut-stone and slate-roofed outbuildings, stables and coach houses, also needing work.

The house is immediately habitable, and has two large formal front reception rooms, kitchen and service rooms to the back, five first floor bedrooms and several WCs/bathroms, and another selection of attic level rooms as well.

Lisnabrin is a bit of a rambling old stunner, ripe for an enthusiast who want lots of living space, some land and amenities.