Mad Men visitors, Hollywood links and  Maureen O'Hara - this €1.25m West Cork home has seen then all

Ballylickey home and barn of US-rooted Murphy family has tales to tell 

Ballylickey, West Cork
€1.25 million
Size	294 sq m (3,168 sq ft)
Bedrooms	5+3 in barn
Bathrooms	3+2
BER	C3

CARRYING the charming name Two Trees, and with spreading Murphy family roots, plus long family friendship links to the late Hollywood acting legend Maureen O’Hara, this one-off West Cork home has hosted the rich, the famous (possibly the infamous!) along with the multi-talented, including global brand CEOs and dancer Michael Flatley.

Lots of timber in Two Trees

Two Trees, at Dromkeal near Ballylickey is a fresh 2023 market arrival with centuries of Irish roots, latter day US-Irish and international roots, and a myriad stories of its own to tell, and also with lives to celebrate.

Two Trees, and more

Set in the Ballylickey beauty spot off the N71 road between Bantry and Glengarriff, it has been the home of the late Bill and Carolyn Murphy for almost half a century, an engaging couple who’d lived internationally in the US, England Germany, and South America, and who moved to West Cork with six young children in the 1970s, having fallen in love with the Irish coastline, from Clare to Cork.

Carolyn became a firm friend and personal assistant for the flame-haired Maureen O’Hara of Quiet Man fame (both pictured right), and who’d also bought Lugdine Park in Glengarriff in the 1970s (Waterfront Lugdine Park on 35 acres sold in 2015 for €1.6m, after Ms O’Hara moved from her beloved Irish home to Idaho aged in her 90s).

Lugdine Park, Glengarriff sold for €1.6m

As well as being a personal assistant, Carolyn Murphy was deeply involved in trying to establish the Maureen O’Hara Centre in Glengarriff. She passed away in 2018, several years after winning a High Court settlement and apology from O’Hara’s nephew, who admitted defaming her, and making for a sad end to a long friendship. Momentum had built for the O’Hara Centre, with support from a number of Hollywood’s elite, including Colin Farrell, Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson, Helen Mirren, and Mia Farrow.

Quiet setting off the N71

Apart from the shakers and movers of the entertainment world, and visitors from musicians and entertainers Two Trees also hosted guests from the world of advertising and business, who flew into Cork and Shannon airports as well as, on occasion, on chartered planes landing on an airstrip at Bantry.

US-born Bill Murphy, of South Philadelphia via four Irish grandparents, passed away in Bantry in January 2022 aged 82, having worked globally for one of the US’s biggest advertising and marketing agencies Interpublic Group.

Ahead of current trends, he commuted from West Cork to London for work from the 1970s, and was the first of his clan to move back to Ireland from the States.

Sun room with shutters

Sons, Kevin and Brendan, who were aged 11 and 12 when they moved to Ireland, note their father travelled to 14 countries out of Cork, in a career that they say Mad Men was almost a pale imitation of, working with the likes of GM and Opel in Germany, food giants Unilever and Kraft, with their tyros visiting Two Trees, as did the CEO of Martini Rossi (vermouth brand) to add a touch of liquor and extra smoothness to the ensemble.

Don Draper and dapper ad world men?

Mad Men days

“They’d have been very well represented in the house,” admits Brendan, citing the line about the high-living world of advertising being “the most fun you can have with your clothes on”. Bill’s wife Carolyn, nee Vail, had a Scottish-Italian heritage and quickly assimilated to life in Ireland,having met met brothers Fr Pat and Stephen Coughlan, Holy Ghost priests from Cork’s Donnybrook while living in Brazil.

They were no relation, but their family became our ‘Irish cousins’,” says Kevin Murphy, one of the six children who were squeezed into what was originally “a two-up, two-down” in Dromkeal in the mid-1970s — three girls in one room, the three boys bunked in in another.

The original purchase had been a 1930s modest farm home on 40 acres, with the land they’d bought including an older 19th century farmhouse, the ruins of a 19th cluster, a bog, and even a ringfort.

And, while the name Two Trees recalls two pines in front of the 1930s house which came to represent Bill and Carolyn Murphy putting down roots here, they also planted a further 26,000 trees sourced from Future Forests’ Mike Collard in nearby Kealkill, Bantry.

Take the plunge?

Initially the parents had sought to buy in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare or Connemara, Co Galway, but after Carolyn visited Ballylickey on advice of a proud Corkman, she fell instantly in love, and bought almost on the spot, without consulting her partner, the well-entrenched family recall.

“Her soul settled onto the land,” says Brendan, adding Two Trees became “their compass”. The house’s hospitality wasn’t just with actors, ad men, and other elites: At one stage the local Bantry twinning committee put out an urgent call to the family to ask if they could feed a delegation of 12 from France visiting on a reconnaissance with local Bantry worthies, to consider twinning Bantry with Brittany. The meal must have passed muster as Bantry is still twinned with Pont-l’Abbé on the French Atlantic coast.

Kitchen at Dromkeal 

Not only is the Murphy surname now well entrenched in West Cork, with adult children and grandchildren still living about and even further west down to Castletownbere, but the name also chimed with the property’s previous owners, two sisters Hannah and Mary Murphy, who’d said they’d only sell to another Murphy.

“We’re not tied to that anymore, we’ll sell to anyone,” quips son Kevin, acting now as executor of his parents’ estate. The considerably enlarged Two Trees was listed in the past week with a €1.25m AMV, quoted by agent Liam Hodnett of Hodnett Forde.

That’s for a long, five-bay five-bed house, almost 4,000 sq ft now after several extensions.

Lofty heights

It has a double roof; one ground-floor bedroom; gable-end sunroom; two reception rooms; kitchen-diner; four first-floor bedrooms (one of them en suite); plus a very atmospheric first-floor library, with feature vaulted ceilings and dark green walls.

The work was done in stages, in the 1980s and 1990s, outlined to a plan by Carolyn who liked the Victorian lodge look and the Tudor look (after some time living in England.) The result is a home full of personality, extensive exposed timbers, ceiling beams, brick big fireplaces, alcoves and windows shutters, some outside on the facade, others inside, such as in the octagonal gable-end sunroom.

The work was done by local experts Murnane & O’Shea, overseen by Donal Hunt, and along with the main house there is a rear barn conversion done to good living standard, holding another three bedrooms.

That barn has accommodated guests; children, grandchildren, and Carolyn’s own father Robert Vail who came to live with them in his latter years.

Two Trees — with, in effect, its two houses — is being sold on an acre by Hodnett Forde’s Liam Hodnett who expects both some local and more overseas interest noting its space, quality, charm, and character and comfort levels, good bathrooms, and C3 BER.

The mature grounds include numerous trees, as well as a tall commissioned bronze sculpture ‘Yes Miss’ by locally based Jeanne Rynhart, who also did Dublin’s Molly Malone statue. At Two Trees, the Rynyart piece (pictured here) is modelled on a niece (the tall teacher) while the child’s face was modelled on Carolyn Murphy herself.

Coincidentally, a biologist currently staying at the property has told the Murphy family the biodiversity is extraordinary, with fauna from deer to hedgehogs, and having recorded over 200 species of flora. It makes for a neat historical loop as one of Ireland’s most famous naturalists, Ellen Hutchins, was born in the 18th century at Ballylickey House and extensively catalogued and drew the West Cork shoreline, of which there are glimpses only from Two Trees.

Bantry Bay view at  Ballylickey, West Cork.

The couple’s own six children Kevin, Brendan, Meghan, Kale (Geraldine), Garrith, and Billy (who died 30 years ago) went to school locally initially for their primary days, and mostly went on boarding schools for secondary.

The proposed family home sale ends one chapter, only, but the Murphy family roots continue in the Two Trees, the 26,000 other trees planted, in next-generation homes nearby, in the three generations that followed them to West Cork almost 50 years ago... and in the Mad Men stories that might get told every now and then too.

VERDICT: You don’t have to be a Murphy to buy at chi-chi Ballylickey this time around.