House of the week

THEY could build them large, and well, back in the 1850s — the Rushbrooke, Cobh home Rackheath House at 4, Beausite is testament to the talents of engineers and builders of that era.

Some of Cork’s best period homes from the Georgian and Victorian ages are dotted around the harbour, in Monkstown and Cobh. Even then, water views were much prized: the air was considered bracing and healthy; the harbour was a hive of activity and wealth-creation, from fishing, shipping, boat building and keeping the Royal Navy on the oceans’ crest; it’s had a strategic military/naval importance since Napoleonic times.

Houses — like this one — intended for naval officers were built to last, and last (the sun did, however, set on this portion of the old British Empire, with ‘Treaty Port’ Cobh/Queenstown returned to Irish control in 1938, years after Independence) and a case in point is this upstanding and substantial period semi-d, with views down over its two-thirds of an acre of grounds at Rushbrooke, to the idle cranes at the old dockyard.