West Cork cottage used in Rose Dugdale's 1974 art heist fetches almost €1m
The three-bed cottage, with stone outbuildings, and 22 acres of rough farmland right on the edge of the Atlantic ocean at Reenogreena, Glandore.
A cliffhanger cottage that was Rose Dugdale’s West Cork hideaway bolthole for the stolen Beit art collection 50 years ago — a haul worth over €100m in today’s terms — has just been sold for close to €1m.
Just changed hands to US-based buyers is a three-bed cottage, some stone outbuildings, and 22 acres of rough farmland right on the edge of the Atlantic ocean at Reenogreena, Glandore.
It is the remote hideaway spot where a pregnant British heiress and IRA collaborator Rose Dugdale, and her then-partner Eddie Gallagher, hid out for 10 days surrounded by an art haul of 19 works from Russborough House that included works by Goya, Gainsborough, Hals, Reubens Vermeer, Velázquez and Vermeer.
Their worth at the time of the daring theft was put at £8m: in today’s values it would equate to €100-€120m.
It was the first of three art thefts from Co Wicklow’s Russborough House, and the only one where the masterpieces seized at gunpoint ended up rolled up in a compact coastal cottage ringed by steep cliffs, rented for £10 a week from local farmhouse owner Con Hayes, and stuffed in the boot of his borrowed Morris Minor car.
The works by European masters went from hanging in a stately 18th century Palladian mansion with 700 inches of facade and its two wings on 200 prime Leinster acres to a Munster smallholding rented by Dugdale, under an alias, as a safe house for the armed gang’s stole canvases.
They were to be used as part of a ransom ploy after the daring April 26, 1974, paintings heist, one of the largest in art history.
By several coincidences of time, Brigid Rose Dugdale died earlier this month, March 18, aged in her 83rd year in a Dublin nursing home, just days before the Irish and UK release of the movie Baltimore, starring Imogen Poots, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and Lewis Brophy.
The film is named after the West Cork village where Dugdale travelled to in the borrowed Morris Minor with the paintings in the boot just before her arrest by Rosscarbery gardaí in a stakeout back at Glandore’s Reenogreena, after 10 days in hiding.
Just released here, the film Baltimore hones in on Dugdale’s psychological journey from privileged, aristocratic birth to political radicalisation, armed robbery and violence.
With a “heist sequence, and intercut with all that is their time in a rustic cottage in the middle of nowhere,” said actor Tom Vaughan-Lawlor.
“They sit around talking about arts and politics and fate and identity and they're a weird motley crew, they're a weird family unit. It's a complex, nuanced film.”
A stand-in property served for the cottage scene filming of Baltimore. The actual property at Reenogreena, a mile from Drombeg Stone Circle, was put up for sale last year for its US owner, who had lived here on and off since he bought it in the 1990s.
Sean Carmody of Charles P McCarthy auctioneers in Skibbereen confirmed the recent change of hands of the three-bed cottage with its own unwitting role in the 1974 daring Beit Collection art theft.
He said a number of viewers, while it had been on the market, were aware of the link to Eddie Gallagher and Rose Dugdale.
It was bought via a ‘buyer’s agent’ acting on behalf of a couple based in the US.
At the time of its market launch, the sales brochure noted “Reenogreena and its surrounding areas are a nature lovers paradise and offer a lifestyle where the usual stresses of everyday life seem to melt away.”
Entirely coincidentally the same estate agent firm has another Reenogreena townland property for sale with a €795,000 asking price, called ‘Hideaway.’
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