Floraville: Where history meets grace and comfort

Tommy Barker visits a fine, venerable Bandon property, once home to a swashbuckling adventurer, now home to a doyenne of cafe business

Bandon’s fine, and venerable, family home Floraville has roots as old as the West Cork town itself. The property has been owned for nearly 30 years by an entrepreneurial Irish legend, Mary Rose O’Donovan, doyenne of the personalised coffee and cake shop and who at one time had 10 Mary Rose cafes under her name, in Ireland and England.

The house’s earliest section was built by a colonising, swashbuckling adventurer on both sides of the Atlantic, Capt William Newce, one of the warring Elizabethans who back in the early 1600s formed the drive known as the Plantation of Munster, when he was ceded lands in Cork for services rendered in the Nine Years War. Some of his Munster lands were leased from Sir Walter Raleigh, and apart from settling temporarily in fledgling Bandonbridge, and establishing the village of Newcestown 10 miles away, he soon afterwards upped sticks for the New World. Capt Newce passed on much of his extensive Bandon holdings to Lord Boyle, Earl of Cork, and died in Virginia in the Americas in 1620 after bloody battles between colonists and Indians.