Fully rebuilt €1.15m Cork house had sad, shadowy past but now comes with a bright future

Ballygroman House by Cork's Killumney was a pivot point in a 1922 massacre,  was burned out, and rebuilt now not once, but twice

Reborn Ballygroman House, Upper Ballygroman, Killumny west of Cork city is guided from €1.15m by agent Brendan Bowe

 

Ballygroman House, Killumney, Cork
€1.15 million
Size	360 sq m (3,850 sq ft)
Bedrooms	5
Bathrooms	6
BER	A3 -

STEEPED in local history over the past 100 years, and more, is Ballygroman House… or at least various versions of the house carrying the same name have that long legacy, as the nation comes to the end of its Decade of Centenaries.

Rebuilt around 2007, and also in the 1920s after being burned out following the 'Ballygroman massacre'

This house, just south of Killumney and Ovens at Ballygroman Upper amid good farmland, on a gently rolling hillside just west of Cork’s expanding Ballincollig, is linked with landowners, academics, and had a quite pivotal and ignominious role in 1922 in the uneasy period after the Truce, when the original 19th century house was the centre of a violent killing, and an even more violent aftermath.

Main living/dining and kitchen is c1,000 sq ft in this one room alone

The events of April 26 1922 saw an IRA commandant Michel O’Neill killed as he tried to enter Ballygroman House to commandeer a car, and IRA reprisals afterwards in which ten local Protestants were shot in revenge with various motives attributed in what became known as the Dunmanway massacre. There were reprisals in ripples as far away as Macroom, and condemnation on both sides of the Irish Sea, and from both pro and anti-treaty supporters, as well as denials of ‘ethnic cleansing’ retaliations amid the brutality.

Setting of Ballygroman House, looking north west to the Cork-Kerry mountains

The Ballygroman House of that time — owned by a Hornibrook family whose guest Herbert Woods (a former British soldier) had shot the IRA’s Michael O’Neill — was burned down after the shooting of O’Neill, and Woods, and father and son Thomas and Samuel Hornibrook were taken captive by the IRA, later killed and were buried in a bog in Newcestown: their bodies have yet to be recovered.

Ballygroman's original facade has been retained in various iterations

The Dunmanway and Ballygroman killings were one of the last attrocities of that period of political unrest in the early days of the new State, repercussions ran deep especially among the Protestant community and, after the burning, a new, replacement Ballygroman House house was built in the same spot.

That next Ballygroman House later became associated with Daniel Corkery, a noted Irish and Gaelic scholar, teacher, writer, artist, woodworker and cultural activist, who’d been born in the city’s Gardiners Hill and who ended his days in the 1960s in a bungalow near Myrtleville.

Hall with chestnut timber staircase

Daniel Corkery had written his best known work The Hidden Ireland in 1924, just a year or two after the Ballygroman massacre, and he is said to have lived here at Killumney between 1929 and 1950, part of that period coinciding with his time as Professor of English in UCC (1930 to 1947), famously beating Seán Ó Faoláin to that post.

Main bedroom with original 'Venetian-style' arched window

Ballygroman House last changed hands again in 1997, when it was bought as a family home by another individual also coincidentally associated with UCC, Prof Duncan Sleeman who headed up the UCC Dental School and Hospital at CUH Wilton and who was quite taken with the coincidental professorial link to Daniel Corkery mentioned in Irish Examiner Property editorial over a quarter of a century ago.

After about ten years of Sleeman family occupation Ballygroman House underwent another se-change, for the positive, when it was largely rebuilt in the mid to late 2000s.

In fact, about all that’s left of any earlier iteration is part of the front wall and façade (pic top right) with its feature tall arched, central Venetian-styled window above the central entry point and porch.

That central surviving arched window is now one of the ‘money shots’ in the third Ballygroman House as it now robustly stands, giving as it does long and distant views to the north and west over lovely farmland to the hills on the Cork-Kerry border, robustly breaking and shaping the horizon.

Ballygroman: approach, with large garage with solar panels helping the 3,800 s ft home get an A3 BER

Not surprisingly, today’s Ballygroman House is an utterly different property to the earlier versions, instanced most assertively in its building energy rating (BER) hitting a very enviable A3, so whatever its past, its current and future status is of a wholly-comfortable, up-to-speed family home that promises and fully delivers on creature comforts.

Large sliding doors in several rooms open to the large patio

With family reared, Ballygroman House comes to the market with estate agent Brendan Bowe who says “it brings everything to the table,” combining space, comforts, the highest standards of internal finishes and fixtures, modernity and yet historical roots, along with immense privacy.”

It’s a kilometre or so uphill of Killumney village with school, shops and services, five minutes or less by car from the Ballincollig bypass/N22, with a discrete entrance with electric gates near large farm holdings but is fully removed from them, with a 450-metre long private approach avenue, landscaped and lush, lined with mature trees dating back to earlier Ballygroman House days and interspersed with ferns and seasonal planting.

Kitchen by Nick Moody, Coachhouse Kitchens

Visitors and residents alike arrive on the eastern side on the now enlarged and reconstructed property where little is given away as to the size, scale and quality within, with pale gravel turning circle by an impressively large, double lofted garage/workshop with a window at its back wall giving an unexpected sweep of views to the tree-ed boundary, circular garden path which rings it, and there’s a suite of raised vegetable beds then to the side in a sheltered side garden.

Here at this first greeting and parking spot too is small level lawn (croquet, anyone?), hammock seating area and — unwanted visitors beware — a chopping block for timber culled from the grounds for the stoves, complete on the Examiner’s 2023 revisit, with an axe set into split logs, like some Excalibur sword in stone.

Is it waiting for some rightful new owner to be able to extract the benignly threatening axe, and bury the hatchet of history of 101 years at Ballygroman?

If so, it will take just a small bit of might, and financial muscle too: Ballygroman House is guided at €1.15 million by Mr Bowe and once viewed, may well get competitive bidding handily above that sort of price threshold.

House in the trees, with bar, seating and electricity 

The property is on 3.3 acres of immaculately-presented grounds, largely level in front where there’s also a second gravelled drive in front of the house, entirely ringed in trees, largely native varieties and with a feature magnolia, and then sloping upwards to back and

to the west wooded boundaries.

'Tree house'

Here, at the top, to the delight of one and all, is a specially commissioned deck house, chalet like in the canopy, a garden room raised up on piles and poles, with a front wall of glass, an outside balcony/viewing deck, with lighting and a power supply, as well as seating, space for overnight guest visits and there’s even a small bar with fridge for minerals and beers and dispensing optics for some harder liqueurs.

Study/home office

“It’s the owners’ favourite retreat spot, but it’s not as though house is short of accommodation or comfortable resting spots,” notes the selling agent who calculates it had close on 3,900 sq ft (360 sq metres) of living and sleeping space and who adds “it never feels too big, it’s a really wonderful layout.”

He’s bang on the money in that description, as almost any size of family can easily feel at home here in this five-bed rebuilt house, with its four en suite first floor bedrooms (so, no fighting for a loo or a shower,) as well as a ground floor, well-placed en suite fifth bedrooms, ideal for visitors and guests, anyone with mobility issues or just a dislike of stairs; alongside is a guest WC, with another WC off a spacious utility room.

Ballygroman’s splayed stairs itself is a lovely piece of expert joinery in chestnut timber, polished and buffed and with a return en route to the first floor which has an off-centre landing for a visual, non-linear layout and creating niches for art and photography display, while every bedroom has a pleasant view and quality, fully-tiled en suite with Grohe showers and Villeroy & Boch sanitary ware.

One of the many bathrooms

At ground, there’s a home office on the front left of entry in the maple floored hall, with extensive desk, display and storage units crafted in walnut, with second desk by the slight, multi-paned bay window.

Or, is it the eye-catcher? Because facing this red wall is a very large sliding door (timber inside, alu-clad outside) to a west-facing patio with stone base, water feature, ringed with planting and seating/BBQ area, and there’s an immediate temptation to go outdoors.

Seen from here is the first glimpse then of Ballygroman’s piece de resistance, the oversize main kitchen/living dining room, in the house’s back corner section.

At nearly 1,000 sq ft or about half the property’s ground floor area, it’s an immense room split carefully into different functions, with a high-gloww, high-capacity gloss kitchen mixed with limestone and walnut and has a scene-setting ‘land-mass’ sized island topped in a mix of materials and purposes with halogen hob, main and prep sinks in stainless steel, and abundance of Miele appliances including multi-oven and microwave, huge slab-fronted fridge with freezer drawers under, encased in walnut. It was done by specialist maker Coachford-based Nick Moody, and is going to suit any level of cook, from home far to high-end haute cuisine.

But, then, this is also a relaxation room, with sprawling sofas, including a U-shaped set-up in front of a wide insert gas fire with chunky polished limestone hearth, overhead wide TV and flanked by numerous other seating options from double sofas to leather armchairs, some designer one-offs and the long main dining table (a mix of smoked glass and walnut) is flanked by leather banquet seating on one side and by a leather clad bench on the other.

This has to be a hospitable room in any season, day or night. It has roof windows and very large sliding doors on two sides or aspects, west and north to the open patio entertainment space, and heating comes from a variety of radiators, include vertical ones on an inside wall by glass display cabinets, from the wide gas stove and from a recently installed wood-burning stove in a bright corner by the well-appreciated and well-used patio ‘room outdoors.’

The builder was local man Tony Keohane who delivered top finishes in this well-conceived, almost deceiving looking home: it might have been rebuilt in ’Tiger Times’ but the exterior appears ‘almost’ modest from several angles, and the high end appliances, materials and finishes in Ballygroman House Mark lll will stand the test of time unlike many of the other large designs of that period, aided and abetted by very mature grounds, by the acre.

Main bedroom

Auctioneer Brendan Bowe has a fair idea already of how it’s going to be received and where interest will come from.

Birds eye view

He has offices in Ballincollig, in Bandon and Kinsale, three quite different catchments with different wealth bases and it would hold its head up with best of any of those location and their upper echelons of buyers in the €1m+ category.

There are well-heeled tech types on the home hunt west of the city who want privacy but not to be remote, as well as the usual mix of medics and there’s plenty of paddock space for the proverbial ponies, as well as gardens for the green-fingered and that large garage for those into motors, DIY and sports.

Gardens are productive as well as decorative

Mr Bowe also expects interest from the returning diaspora, who he says don’t have a lot of choice of walk-in order homes of this calibre in and around Cork and the fact it’s pristine, and doesn’t need anything done to it is a bonus, he adds at a time of construction blockages, shortage and sky-high costs.
VERDICT: After a tumultuous period in the past, the present and future at Ballygroman House seems to be one of tranquil comforts and cosseting.