Go turn the key on your Grá Mo Chroí

Durrus, West Cork

€545,000

Size: 249 sq ft (2,700 sq ft)

Bedrooms: 3+1

Bathrooms: 3

BER: E1

With delectable views over Dunmanus Bay, this Durrus double delight is located in a walkers’ paradise, Tommy Barker reports.

They say you can’t eat scenery, but settings like West Cork’s Sheep’s Head peninsula and the Mizen penisula certainly nourish the soul — and, the start last night of the Taste of West Cork food festival will fill in all other gaps.

Running for 10 days, until September 16, West Cork’s Taste-fest spans 250 events, at 41 locations, including Sheep’s Head, where the peninsula’s best local produce gets an special airing tonight at the Old Creamery, with tales to be told of each item’s provenance on nearby farms.

Up to 30,000 visitors and participants are expected overall at the festival, expanding annually faster than the average waistband, and it’s likely that some at least may have property appetites whetted by the arrival this month of Grá mo Chroí for sale, with a tourism/accommodation offer under its wings.

Listed with estate agent Maeve McCarthy of Charles P McCarthy & Co Skibbereen, it’s a 2,700 sq ft extended home, enlarged out of an original c 1970s three-bed bungalow, which was bought by a couple over 30 years ago with Irish, UK and North American backgrounds.

Set at the Bantry/inland end of the peninsula by Durrus, and just beyond the acclaimed Blairs Cove restaurant for further foodie delights, it’s on 0.6 of an acre, and after their purchase the couple subsequently drafted in the services of local artist and architect John Verling to design an extension/annex for them.

Mr Verling added on a T-link, in stone, and it comprises a slate-floored open plan living/dining area, with overhead dormer style en suite bedroom and walk in robe. There’s an octagonal-shaped sun-room on the gable, for the best of the views down to Dunmanus Bay, and over towards the Beara Peninsula, as well as over the property’s grounds: the grounds are cut through by a stream which cascades to the sea by a waterfall beyond the Mine Road at the main, R591. The Mine Road links back over the hills towards Ballydehob, so-called after the area’s days when the Durrus hinterland had slate quarries, copper mines, and barium sulphate, or barytes mines.

Each house section — the sales brochure bills one as ‘the stone cottage’, the other as ‘attached bungalow’ has a kitchen and separate electricity metre, and so can be loaned out, rented out, farmed out, and overall condition is very good, with high grade windows, slate roof, and pressurised water system.

Views are north west, out over mussel beds in Dunmanus Bay and towards the Beara and Sheep’s Head peninsula, which is home to one of Ireland’s earliest signposted long walking routes, some 88kms as well as a choice of other signed walks and hikes. Among those who’ve been lured to the beauty spot on the Wild Atlantic Way are Graham Norton at Ahakista, and writers Zadie Smith and Nick Laird, who bought a do-er up farm house on that facing peninsula after visits to the Bantry Literary Festival.

Adaptable Grá mo Chroí will suit walkers, large families and for entertaining visitors, and the sales spiel says the stone-faced annex can seat six for dinner... or 10 if you borrow four chairs from the house’s ‘other half!’

VERDICT: Plenty to chew on.