West Cork island sales have been ringing in millions, but you can bag Middle Calf for €750,000 (and it comes with a herd of Kerry Bog Ponies)

Middle Calf Island is

Fri, 11 Mar, 2022 - 11:30

Catherine Shanahan

Middle Calf Island

€750,000

Size: 25 Hectares/62 acres

GIVEN Hollywood’s love affair with the Irish oileán, you could be forgiven for thinking that a short online video clip of a small and beautiful island off the west coast of Ireland, where the only sign of life is a sublime herd of Kerry Bog Ponies, cantering past the ruins of long-deserted homes, is a movie trailer, or, at the very least, a dreamy Fáilte Ireland promotional video.

Middle Calf Island, Roaringwater Bay, Baltimore

In fact it’s a video of up-for-sale Middle Calf, the latest in a series of privately-owned islands in West Cork’s Roaringwater Bay to come to market — yours to own, if, pardon the pun, you can pony up €750,000. You can have the ponies too, all 25 of them, for the same price. Interest will be significant if recent experiences are indicative.

In 2020, two West Cork islands made big money. The first, 157-acre Horse Island, made international headlines. It allegedly sold for €5.5m to Cypriot businessman, John Renos, who bought it, site-unseen, from Dublin financier Adrian Fitzgibbon and his wife Deborah.

Horse Island, Roaringwater Bay, Baltimore

His request to the real estate agents acting on his behalf was for a safe, private island in Europe. With violent war raging on Europe’s borders, it seems like a wise buy. The same year, the less-developed 123 acre Castle Island, another Roaringwater Bay sale, was reported to have been bought by an Englishman based in France, for €1.5m, twice the price of Middle Calf and also twice the size.

The common tread here for island-buying is ultra high-net-worth individuals, for whom privacy is the ultimate prize.

Things are shaping up a little differently for fresh-to-market Middle Calf, where, right now, a potential Irish buyer is to the forefront. Selling agent Dominic Daly says it’s someone with an interest in the environment and in the restoration of the old, deserted dwellings — the island even had a school once.

“It’s someone who would like to see the island restored and to live on it, someone from the environmental sector, perhaps looking at establishing a cultural centre,” he says, adding that a “serious offer” has been made.

The vendor, a descendant of families that lived on the island, the Crowleys and Scullys, the last of whom left for the mainland in the 1930s, has looked after Middle Calf’s environmental wellbeing.

A decade or so ago, he introduced those fabulous Kerry Bog Ponies, designed to withstand harsh conditions and as surefooted on mountain and bog as a goat. He cleaned out bogland so the ponies would have a clean water supply. No fertilisers or pesticides were ever used on the island, he says.

“It’s mainly unimproved grassland, as organic as it gets,” he says.

“It’s been kept grazed by the ponies and I had a flock of sheep on it before that.” The ponies are thriving — he visits once a month during winter and most days during summer, when he sails over from nearby Schull, and a vet checks them out annually. He has a great grá for these ponies, a breed that remains on the endangered list, but whose numbers are rising slowly, thanks to the efforts of bodies like the Kerry Bog Pony Society, of which he is a member.

The island was particularly enjoyable during summer time, the vendor says. “We’d have camped out here, maybe for a week in fine weather.” While the island has no pier, they used inflatables to get ashore from sail boats, or you could row up on the strand in a small boat.

Kids loved the small golden, sandy beach on the sheltered eastern side. “It’s ideal for children, it’s very safe, the water gets deep very gradually and there is no pollution,” he says.

A point of interest is the steel mast of a ship visible on the west side of the island at low tide. It is that of a sailing ship, the Savona, which was wrecked off the western side of the island in January 2009. Fortunately, no lives were lost.

The amount of wildlife on Middle Calf is phenomenal. It’s a breeding ground for seabirds like the Artic Tern, cormorants nest on its cliffs, seal colonies breed on the rocks on its eastern side, hares abound and it’s home to numerous rare plants.

The only sign of human habitation is the ruins of four homes. About 15 years ago, the vendor applied for outline planning permission to reconstruct one of the ruins and to do up outbuildings. He was successful, so a precedent has been set.

He also made submissions to Cork County Council and to the Office of Public Works for the four ruins and a landing pier to be exempted from the island’s designation as part of a broader Special Area of Conservation (SAC), so that it wouldn’t interfere with the planning. That exemption was granted and still stands, the vendor says. “So the environmental designation would not be a complication [for future planning applications],” he adds.

Moreover, there’s plenty of building stone on Middle Calf - also some lovely old stone walls -, which is 5.7km off shore from Schull and 3.8km from Cape Clear, with East and West Calf 500m either side.

The vendor points out also that farming entitlements come with the land.

While he’ll be sorry to let the island of his ancestors go — just one member of the Middle Calf community is still alive, on the mainland, in his 90s — he recently retired himself and says the timing is right to sell.

VERDICT: Wild horses may not drag you there, but wild ponies surely will. Idyllic hideaway.