Starter home: Crosshaven, Cork €100,000

Tommy Barker on the charms of a centuries-old protected thatched cottage by the sea at Crosshaven that is priced to sell quickly.

Sq m 33 (350 sq ft)

Bedrooms: 2

Bathrooms: 2

BER: Exempt

How do you spell this cute cottage’s name? Is it Tied Cottage? Nope. Tidy? No, again; it’s Tide Cottage, and there’s a clue in the name... it’s by the sea, in Cork harbour’s Crosshaven.

Set just off the Point Road, at Scotsman’s Point, this compact original fisherman’s pad, has seen at least two centuries of ups and downs, tides, and market movements too.

At the Irish property market’s exuberant flood tide, in 2005, it went for sale guiding €425,000. A chastened decade later, it’s back and is due an auction disposal.

Now guiding at €100,000, tidy Tide Cottage is due for sale on May 27, with auctioneer Malcolm Tyrrell of Cohalan Downing (who at the opposite end of the auction scale had a €27m land disposal in the mid 2000s on Cork’s Airport Road.)

This basic, centuries-old dwelling is a protected structure, and has “great potential to enhancement and develop a coastal cottage,” Mr Tyrrell says.

Facing the waters of Cork harbour and Currabinny, it’s only about 500 sq ft, give or take, with two tiny bedrooms, it has a WC/shower room, plus living room with inglenook fireplace plus wood-burning stove.

Total site area might be as much as a quarter acre, but it’s steep and rising at the back.

Tide Cottage is one of the very few thatched homes left around Cork harbour, or at least on the harbour’s western side as thatch is more an East Cork phenomenon, ‘though there’s another one at least on the main Currabinny road.

VERDICT: Comb over and see it, sometime.