House of the week

THE living space at this Longueville, Mallow home is first class in more ways than one — it was originally the ‘First’ classroom in a two-room school, built about 1890.

A real slice of local north Cork life in the parish of Ballyclough is The Old School House, built to the back of the Longueville House estate, and now owned by Jane O’Callaghan of Longueville, whose family took on (or took back — the O’Callaghans were dispossessed from the land in the 1600s by Cromwell) the 500 acre estate and 1720s great house, opening it up to paying guests in the 1970s as a 20-bedroomed hotel.

Jane and the late Michael O’Callaghan ‘traded down’ to the privacy of the old school, with Michael overseeing its conversion after they bought it when it closed in the 1970s: the introduction of ‘free’ education and school buses in 1969 by Donagh O’Malley sounded this small, two-class school’s demise with local children bussed instead to other, larger schools in Mallow and Ballyclough.