Trading up: Rosscarbery, Cork €225,000

Sq m: 90 (970 sq ft)

Even the house name, Lazy Acre, is evocative, with promises of summer pastures and birds’ song, hot days and evening BBQs: and maybe even a dip in the sea to cool off? It’s all on offer at Rosscarbery’s Lazy Acre.

Set just up off the Warren strand road at West Cork’s Rosscarbery, this older-style cottage is going to excite wishful longing and holiday home, or retirement home, hopes and dreams.

The safe Warren strand and its pitch and putt course is five minutes’ walk, the village of Ross is a few minutes’ walk the opposite direction over the causeway by the lagoon and watersports centre, and there may even be scope at some stage for a second dwelling on the acre, as one or two neighbours have done for family members.

Selling agent is John Hodnett of Hodnett Forde, who lives locally and guides at €225,000, noting you can see the rise and fall of the tide just across the road from Lazy Acre’s entrance. Mr Hodnett had a similar property for sale back in 2004 — which made a quite incredible circa €500,000 then.

VERDICT: A rare buy at a far more realistic price than its equivalent neighbouring predecessor.