House of the week: Gearagh House, Rossmore, Clonakilty

WEST Cork’s Rossmore area is no stranger to drama — after all, for the last 58 years Rossmore has hosted its own annual highly-regarded, amatuer (but no less competitive) West Cork Drama Festival, complete with local community/arts hall with hydraulic stage, and a wine bar, and where the festival run for 2019 just finished up earlier this month.

No stranger to drama either is Gearagh House, Rossmore, a Victorian-era property of some stature, with its roots back in Famine times, when it was built as a Protestant School for a village to be established closeby, by one of the five Earls of Bandon, the Barnard family (who claim distant links to Justin Trudeau Prime Minister of Canada.)