Fun, quirky mid-1800s Cork farmhouse on 3.5-7.5 acres anyone?

Tommy Barker on the many homely features of this mid-1800s Lissarda farmhouse. Pictures: Niamh Whitty

Fri, 11 Sep, 2020 - 15:00

THERE’S been quite the knowing visual eye cast over the presentation of Ashmore House, a mid-1800s Co Cork farmhouse as it comes up for sale — its owner is a well-regarded window dresser (or, creative display artist as her formal title) with a major city centre department store.

Owner Geraldine Hanley has been here for 14 years, and Ashmore has provided a fun and funky farm base in a mid-Cork rural heartland for her family, as well as an introduction to the joys of rearing livestock.

Yet, you’d hardly pair her home style and family lifestyle with the big retail windows she dresses professionally.

Gable end with pergola and simple pizza oven is funky, a real room outside, just off the kitchen

She’d rather not divulge the name of the department store where she does signature displays (clue: big, posh, expensive, on Cork’s St Patrick’s Street as well as in other Irish cities), and really, comparing her city job with her homework, well, we’re talking chalk and cheese.

It could even be as different as chalk and mozzarella cheese, in fact, given the fact that small herds of buffalo, whose milk here and elsewhere around Macroom create top cheeses, have grazed these fields at times.

The great outdoors right on your doorstep.

The Hanley family, Geraldine and Richard, arrived here from Cork city to this Lissarda hinterland homestead back about 14 years ago and fell immediately for its charms and scope.

We’re talking a location at Hornhill, Lissarda, not too far from Béal na mBláth and the Bantry line, on up to 7.5 acres of good ground which includes pasture, paddocks and two traditional curve-roofed steel barns, all in a mixed farmland setting, and with some wind turbines in the area whirring around for visual engagement.

It is, as Geraldine says, about 25 minutes from Ballincollig, 35 from Cork city, 40 minutes from the airport and about the same distance from Killarney but is, in fact, a world away from the daily grind in any or all of those referenced contact points.

“ When we first walked into the farmyard to view it, there was this magical feeling about the place. We instantly fell in love with it, and we only discovered after moving in that there was so much more to this farm than we’d first thought or appeared. There’s a perfect fairy fort nearby, and some stone circles also are within walking distance that quite a few people come out to visit” she recalls.

The move west from the city “was to give our kids a better way of life and more of an understanding of where their food came from and also to live in a community in the country, where everyone knew their neighbours,” Geraldine explains.

“I got a herd number when we first moved here and started with Angus cattle, and then bought Buffalo. We had them for a number of years and now, in the last few years I’m rearing rose veal (from humanely-reared calves in contrast to white veal) for Eoin O'Mahony butchers in the English Market.” (O’Mahonys are 40 years in the trade, doing whole-beast butchering and supplying up to 20 Cork restaurants.) She recalls swapping their beef with a sheep producer for his lamb (their son Marcel, now 29 has become a vet, working in Millstreet, who advised against rearing sheep on cost/return grounds!). “We also had our own pigs which we used to make our own sausages.

“We had turkeys and we even had a pony, we have hens and ducks and there is an abundance of wildlife from hedgehogs to buzzards, owls, bats and even deer pop in from time to time,” Geraldine extols of the bucolic, hand-on lifestyle, adding almost needlessly “they loved life growing up on the farm,” as she further adds about the scene with kids’ birthday parties centered around the two barns.

Free-range indeed.

Time has crept up on the clan, and a move even further west might well be on the cards. Another son, Luke 21 is in college in Limerick, appropriately studying food science, while the youngest, daughter Kaelin who’s 17 is a student in Coláiste Daibheid.

The Hanleys’ south-facing Hornhill is a four-bedroomed, traditional layout two-storey Irish farm dwelling, with courtyard cluster of old outbuildings with studio/conversion potential, plus barns. A date on a pillar, 1863, may well refer to the date this gently updated and nudged along house was built, while also dating back many years is a tiny shoe from a donkey, inserted between two stones by the front door ‘for luck'. Or for tying up a sheepdog?

The land stretches to as much as 7.5 acres, but the asking price of €280,000 is for the house and 3.5 acres, with a further four acres also available by negotiation. So, it’s hobby farm-sized rather than likely to fund a family on or from its own produce, but, certainly, a good productive work-life balance is on offer.

It has two front entrances, with one in the middle of the long run of the front wall now graced by a chunky-timber sheltering porch, and inside are two reception rooms, one with a traditional fireplace the other with a pot-belly stove in a fireplace.

Ceilings here, and in fact in most of the other rooms upstairs and down, are traditional in style, in tongue and groove timber sheeting, with some exposed beams and trusses, and décor is simple, a nod to the past really, with some wallpapered walls and others simply painted white.

The inviting /dining room is very much the heart of the house, with range cooker plus corner stove, plus old hand-painted and ‘distressed’ pine units, all watched over by roof beams decorated with tiny fairy or seed lights draped around. “My favourite place is the kitchen, where we gather around the table, for meals and great conversation. We have a lot of callers, hence the reason for the half door, it’s like a welcome on the mat,” notes Geraldine. “Friends and family and neighbours gather around our kitchen table regularly, and that’s what I wanted to achieve in this home.” Extending out from the kitchen, through a wide opening with double doors punched in the western gable is “another favourite place”, the patio with the pergola

The centre of the home at Ashmore House, Hornhill, Lissarda, Co Cork

and climbing plants, plus a simple steel pizza oven, making for an extension of the kitchen, of sorts.

Character abounds, and quirkiness, and it’s a real home, not a showhouse (or a window dressing job), and there’s still the feel of a genuine old farm dwelling, kept lively.

Auctioneer is John O’Mahony of OM2 estate agents in Ballincollig, and he guides the beguiling mix on 7.5 acres with outbuildings and barns all-in at €280,000, about the price of an older era three-bed semi-d in a Cork city suburb.

Preparing to have the property visited for the sale process, vendor Geraldine Hanley cheerfully reckons “we put our own stamp on it without changing the look of this beautiful house, we wanted to respect the hard work and imagination that was put into it first day, it’s a very special place.

“I wouldn't change a thing; it’s beautiful the way it is, it’s quirky and different, a bit like myself,” she quips.

VERDICT: As the song chorus goes “oh, show me a home, where the buffalo roam…”