Shamrocks ahoy! Push the boats out for Bushes’ sale by Baltimore harbour's Beacon

Boat builders the Bushe clan are selling ocean-topping signal headland acres on Ireland's Atlantic Way

Wed, 13 Mar, 2024 - 23:01

Tommy Barker

A FAMILY steeped in the sea, sailing, and boat building, and with 60 ‘Shamrock’ yachts to its credit, is selling land this St Patrick’s weekend at one of the Irish coast’s most iconic and photographed settings, the Beacon in West Cork’s Baltimore.

Land west of the Beacon at the entrance to Baltimore harbour for sale: file pic Denis Scannell.

Being sold by the Bushe family of Munster and international boatbuilding renown is 9.88 acres of cliff-topping land adjacent to the sentinel 19th-century Baltimore harbour-guarding Beacon tower, surveying islands, the Atlantic, and every passing craft coming from Sherkin Island, Cape Clear, and further afield.

It’s such a special and high profile setting that getting planning to do anything with it other than appreciate just how special it is (underground house, maybe?) would be a challenge but “it’s part of the jigsaw mapof Ireland”, says Mark Bushe.

The Bushe family are generations associated with the historic harbour of Baltimore, with one strand in the village and pub-owning, the other more associated with Crosshaven and boatyards around Cork harbour.

Baltimore Harbour with the Beacon centre, distance

Now in its third generation of boat-building, the family line started a century ago with Tom Bushe building at ‘The Cove’, later at Skinners boatyard in the village, and subsequently via his son, the legendary George Bushe, and into the current generation with Tom Bushe’s grandchildren, Majella, a sailmaker, and builders Killian, Mark, and Fergus in Cork harbour, at Ringaskiddy, Rochestown, Crosshaven, Carrigaline, and in Sweden.

South Coast boatyard, now Harty's Quay, Rochestown in 1979. Pic. Richard Mills)

Legendary boats they have been associated with range from Whitbred contenders to Volvo Ocean 60 2001/02 race winner such as Illbruck Challenge — called the Green Dream Machine — to NCB Ireland a decade earlier, as well as classic 20th-century Cork yachts, many favoured by the local ‘merchant princes’, such as Irish Mist, Big Apple, Golden Apple, and Golden Shamrock.

Steeped in brine, the Bushe family produced up to 60 Club Shamrock keel boats in the 1970s from Harty’s Quay/South Coast Boatyard (now home to high-end water-fronting apartments) bringing total output to hundreds of craft, many of them scattered around the globe and still navigating.

Killian Bushe with Harold Cudmore in 1977 in front of Shamrock at Rochestown's Harty's Quay

Back at Baltimore, the harbour mouth headland is owned by two strands of
the Bushe clan, in family hands for over a century or more.

The side on the east with the mid 19th-century, 50ft tall ‘Lot’s Wife’ white-painted Beacon (and not for sale) is owned by the local side of the Bushe family, and to the west dropping down to the water at the mouth of the harbour facing Sherkin is the 9.88 acres owned by the ‘Cork harbour’ Bushes.

Following the death of Carmel Bushe in 2021, and George Bushe in 2011, the next generation is preparing for sale rather than sail at Baltimore: and, they recall their family holidays when all six siblings (Mark, Killian, and Fergus, and daughters Bernice, Majella and the late Deirdre,) and parents, spent full summers on board boats of various sizes they'd sailed down to Baltimore from Crosshaven.

This signal piece of West Cork real estate goes to market this bank holiday weekend with estate agent Michael McKenna, who guides at a suitably lofty €1.2m.

It is as steep a price target as its shoreline, but this is prime West Cork, Baltimore, headland.