Plenty to write home about at €2.5m centuries-old Drombeg House in Glandore

Built in the 17th century, this home is now entering its golden age

Drombeg House

Glandore, West Cork
€2.5m
Size	Size: 450 sq m (4,820 sq ft) on 8 acres
Bedrooms	5+1
Bathrooms	6
BER	Exempt

Time has been reversed at glorious Glandore’s Drombeg House — “I would say the house has never been as warm or comfortable in its 360 years,” says one of the owners of the 1660s-built home, surely one of a very elite core of habitable 17th century Cork homes that isn’t a tower, a castle, or a stone hut.

Immediately distinctive due to its dozen, double- gabled tall chimney stacks more commonly seen on vast country piles, and only recently fully upgraded to gleaming good health, with once unimaginable interior creature comforts, Drombeg House is new to market this month with a €2.5m price guide, in a ‘gold coast’ setting where multi-million euro properties are close to 10 a penny.

Essentially a stone-built robust farmhouse in style and substance, Drombeg House has been prized by owners the British/American writer and journalist Jonathan Self, his Cork City-born wife Rose Sullivan, and their now adult children. They bought it back in 1995, though Jonathan observes that back then “everyone in the area still called it Jones’s” and possibly still do in some quarters.

Almost within a standing stone’s throw of the Bronze Age Drombeg stone circle, Drombeg House was associated with the Jones family for several centuries, from the mid-1600s up until 1923.

Picture: Denis Scnannel

Lewis’ A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland in 1837 records it as “the residence of the Rev Jonas Travers Jones”. Lewis also listed the early 1800s owners of Glandore Castle, Kilfinnan Castle, Stone Hall, and number of other substantial ‘seats’ in that same, seminal guide.

Several of those rather grand Glandore region houses have changed hands in the past few decades for sums unimaginable in the 19th century.

Think close to €6m for Kilfinnan Castle (showing on the Price Register at €5.732m, but the land with it meant it fetched a bit more), or €3.399m for Stone Hall in 2022, while Seamark made €3.7m in depressed 2012. In all, 12 Glandore homes have so far made over €1m, and the three mentioned here tipped over €3m.

The oldest of them all, Drombeg House, has had its own mixed fortunes down the centuries and had gone into decline in the decades after being vacated by the Jones family in the 1920s, says Jonathan Self.

He recalls their first Christmas at the house 31 years ago: “Our nearest neighbour, Sheila O’Sullivan, sadly, no longer with us, told me that it was the first time there had been children and a tree in the house for the holiday season for almost a hundred years,” adding “there are long memories in the country!”

The amount of land originally with Drombeg House had shrunk over the Jones family’s hugely long tenure, and the house got an appreciative owner in the 1960s, the locally-born Barty Whelton and his wife Bridie. They had returned to Glandore after many years working in the US and Alaska; the couple were well-known and not just for their presence driving the local roads of Glandore and Union Hall in a Rolls Royce, or in their vintage Mercedes convertible.

Having bought more property locally, the Wheltons sold Drombeg on eight acres with walled garden and lodge to a family called Parks.

After being widowed for some time, Mrs Eleanor Parks was encouraged by family to return to England in the 1990s and when the Selfs spotted it “she did not want to go, and who could blame her? Anyway, Eleanor made viewings very difficult including refusing to let me see inside”.

“However, on my second visit I brought her a huge bunch of flowers and she relented.

“Both my viewings were on misty days and so it was a wonderful surprise to discover that the house (which faces south) had such wonderful sea views,” says Jonathan, who adds: “I corresponded with Eleanor for many years until she died and we have always referred to the drawing room as Mrs Parks’ room, because that was where she spent all her time.”

Writing is in the Self family blood: father Peter Self was a journalist and academic, mother Elizabeth was US-born and worked in publishing, while Jonathan’s brother Will Self is a very high profile English figure, a prolific and polemical writer and broadcaster.

Jonathan started a career as an advertising copywriter, founding his business Self Direct in 1982, and penning a memoir Self Abuse in 2001, among a number of wide-ranging other titles, as well as journalism, with still regular columns for Country Life magazine.

“My father made lots of Irish friends during World War Two (he was part of the team who negotiated to buy food from the Irish government) and so we were backwards and forwards visiting them from the early 1960s onwards.

“In the 1980s I started to write copy for Bank of Ireland and moved to Dublin. I had been on several walking tours to West Cork and as soon as I was able I bought Drombeg House,” Self recounts.

However, due to a peripatetic lifestyle, including stints with environmental charity World Land Trust, becoming a trustee of the Rainforest Trust and supporting the UK charity Room to Read “it wasn’t until a few years ago that Rose and I had the energy (and finances) to undertake a really major renovation”.

He and Rose credit Jim Griffiths of Beacon Properties who took on their renovation and did, they say, a fantastic job, stripping the venerable old building back to its bare walls, and being left to dry out for two years before being put back together. They were also assisted by Richard Good-Stephenson, who founded the specialist Roundtower Lime company in Innishannon, and who has restored many period properties, including his family’s early 19th century Cor Castle, left a ruin for decades after being burned in 1921, still one of Cork’s most striking castle rescues.

The Selfs admit to deep regrets at selling, due to health and other issues “and with family spread all over the world we just aren’t able to use the house as much as we would like”.

During their happy times here, they count perhaps 8,000 walks from their front door, with the 1,000 BC Drombeg Stone Circle an amble away, or more of a leg stretch is Coppinger’s Court, a fortified mansion built in the 1620s, and a striking ruin since 1750. Right on their doorstep is Glandore’s RC church.

Within a walk too is chi-chi Glandore village — a stand-out beauty spot on the Wild Atlantic Way with its pier, sailing club, bars, and restaurants. Close to hand are coves and beaches, such as the sheltered Tralong Bay where the family kept a small boat, used they reckon, for 600 or 700 short trips along the indented coastline.

Back on home turf, solid terra firma, Drombeg House is still anchored to eight acres, including the one-acre walled garden, lightly tended and not having seen spraying in Selfs’ and Parks’ combined 50 years here.

The grounds have seen horses, sheep, goats, and hens and “around 2000 I bought 20 pigs to clear the walled garden. It turned out they weren’t practicing safe sex, and so I became an accidental pig farmer for several years,” Jonathan admits of one of his rasher gestures.

Selling the premium three-storey, 4,800 sq ft five-bed bed house (plus one-bed lodge) now for the scattered Self family is Skibbereen-based estate agent Maeve McCarthy of Charles P McCarthy, who’ve previous claimed some of Glandore’s biggest sales. She can expect interest from home, and abroad, with key selling points being its history and heritage, as well as immaculate, fully restored and conserved condition (it’s BER exempt, but getting one could be gratifying).

Ms McCarthy says that “behind its classical façade lies a house that has been comprehensively restored and refined in recent years”, adding that after having its walls stripped back to the bare stone “it was meticulously reconstructed, with a clear emphasis on quality, proportion, and longevity”.

Listed are creature comforts like underfloor heating at ground, under solid oak boards, with antique radiators on the upper floors, oil-fired with flexibility allowed for in any future energy upgrades, as well as full insulation, replastering, complete rewiring and replumbing, new slating over the double roof, new rainwater goods, plus quality, Georgian-style timber sash windows and doors.

The agents add that several of the bedrooms and reception rooms are also configured to accommodate stoves and fireplaces, if a new owner wants to fit them, while a drone shot shows most of the 12 diagonal-set, ashlar limestone chimney stacks have been capped on top for protection from the elements, and birds.

Internally, Drombeg House (sparsely furnished after its recent conservation completion) has a central hall with wide, original staircase with tall, arched window on the return; formal drawing room; study and kitchen/dining room with french doors in a side gable, along with a pantry, store, boot room, and guest WC.

Above, two of the mid-level’s three bedrooms are en suite (with a roll-top cast iron bath with claw feet in one), there’s a family bathroom and laundry room, while two attic level bedrooms share a shower room, with Velux windows, and seacoast views, best from the upper floors.

Back outside the one acre, irregularly-shaped walled garden “is a particularly attractive element, offering both historic interest and potential for further cultivation or landscaping”, says Maeve McCarthy, noting other elements include the one-bed gate lodge facing the church, a simple stable block with three loose boxes, tack room and work area, a barn and garage, and a former sand arena.

VERDICT: Squares the circle at Drombeg: a genuinely rare heritage property which has seen out the 1600s, the 1700s, the 1800s, the 1900s, and now a quarter of the 2000s also. It is, quite literally, the most comfortable it has even been, in its own skin. And, it’s in Glandore...