Vast Cork former TB sanitorium complex available for the price of a bungalow

Worse than the Covid-19 pandemic's 1,960 deaths this year, the long-lasting Tuberculosis epidemic often claimed the lives of over 10,000 a year in Ireland when this Co Cork sanitorium was built

A 110-year-old former medical facility and sanatorium designed to counter the tuberculosis epidemic which annually claimed 5,000 to over 10,000 Irish lives over several decades has come for sale.

Guided at just €350,000 by Lisney Cork on behalf of the HSE – about the price of an average county bungalow - is the quite extraordinary Heatherside Hospital complex.

It comprises over 56,000sq ft of buildings, church, houses and other structures, on 22 acres in the hills of Ballyhoura Country.

Heatherside opened in 1909 in the Ballyhoura Hills  off the N20 Cork-Limerick rod s a sanatorium to combat tuberculosis.

Heatherside opened in 1909 as Ireland’s first county sanatorium to combat the devastation caused by TB, also known as consumption or the White Plague.

It’s set at Streamhill near Buttevant, in the remote Munster Ballyhoura Hills, which are now a locus for an invigorating range of centre for outdoor activities, from many miles of mountain biking trails and support facilities, walking and hiking, orchards, fishing, hospitality and more.

As it comes for sale, Lisney agents David McCarthy and Amanda Isherwood say the very substantial and sizeable mix on 22 acres may suit a sports or scouting organisation given Ballyhoura’s remarkable branding and rural-decline reversing profile.

The 22-acre site has been suggested as a possible location for a sports or scouting organisation. Picture: Brian Lougheed

It may also suit outdoor activity operators, tourism entrepreneurs, or as a spiritual, yoga or religious retreat.

The site in Ballyhoura Country includes a chapel.

Coillte, who own surrounding forestry, may also make a play for it, but are unlikely to have a use for the array of buildings in search of a new purpose, and which are now suffering from vandalism.

The bracing Ballyhoura outdoor setting, reached at the end of a long avenue pat locked gates, is ironic today, given the site’s original selection for its copious amounts of fresh air, considered a key tool in the early 20th century’s battle against TB, along with hygiene and isolation.

It was built after years of rampant TB which lasted a century, from the mid-1800s far longer and Ireland than elsewhere in Europe. It came as limited relief at a  time when the alternative was near-certain death and usually at an early age, in a fever hospital.

In Ireland's early 1900s, TB was still rampant, infectious and close to incurable: prior to the success of drug treatments by the 1940s and 1950s here and the eradication drive by Dr Noel Browne, sanitoria such as those pioneered at Heatherside were a patient’s only hope of recovery.

Often, moves to establish them were resisted by local communities, afraid of the health and infection risk …and even the impact on local property values.

Heatherside closed in 2010, having served as a HSE psycho-geriatic hospital, having  ceased as a remote TB sanitorium in the 1950s

Delivered by the local authority and after fundraising and campaigning, Heatherside was an Irish outlier health centre, along with a Crooksling Co Wicklow facility. Among the many residents/patients here in Ballyhoura and one who made a recovery, was the poet Seán Ó Ríordáin, who left in 1938 and who wrote extensively about his life with TB.

This remote Munster 10 minutes north of the N20 Cork-Limerick road (Munster Rugby lockdown training camp, anyone?) and 7km from Doneraile, was gifted by local Doneraile and Streamhill landowner Langley Brasier-Creagh.

Also pivotal in its delivery was the Countess of Aberdeen, wife of twice Ireland viceroy Lord Aberdeen, a social and health reformer and suffragette who’d campaigned nationally for TB relief.

Apart from promoting the Womens National Health Association (WHNA), and  Irish crafts and fabrics internationally and at World Fairs, Countess or Lady Aberdeen toured the country with early Irish "information roadshows" in horse-drawn caravans called Eire, Phoenix and Blue Bird.

Foundation  stone for the Cork sanitorium laid by Countess Aberdeen

Countess Aberdeen laid the foundation stone of the Sanatorium for Consumptives at Heatherside in 1909: the stone still stands.

With its red-roofed central main building redolent of Scandinavian or Swiss spas, and numerous rooms opening at ground and first-floor level to terraces and balconies, it was quite literally a life-saving breath of fresh air for consumptives, and added in later years were other structures, laundry, doctor’s private residence, nurses quarters and a distinctive timber chapel with a scissor truss roof.

Heatherside continued as a sanatorium until the 1950s and was later a psycho-geriatric home.

Several of the buildings feature in the National Inventory of Buildings of Ireland, but are not protected structures.

It continued as a sanatorium until the 1950s, when the last patient transferred to Sarsfields Court near Glanmire in Cork City.

It was used for subsequent decades as a psycho-geriatric home until 2010, when residents moved to St Mary’s Orthopaedic Hospital campus in Gurranabraher, Cork.

Details: Lisney 021-4275079