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SALE OF BEAUTIFUL DETACHED RESIDENCE OF CHARACTER SET ON CA. 1.7784 ACRES AT COOMACROBEG HOUSE, KEALKIL, WEST CORK.

Coomacrobeg House is a glorious mountain retreat with a rich history. The house is surrounded by its barns and behind the biggest barn, on land still belonging to the adjacent farm, is the ruin of an intriguing tall building, which an interested stonemason identified as a watermill. He was obviously right because, out of sight, a small stream was still issuing from under an enormous arch well below the level of the building. The presumption is that most of the water from the millstream was diverted when the Forestry people took over the land. The family who owned this mill when it was working also owned the house and barns and the fields around them. They were very substantial citizens and they could afford to built well. The house is 14 foot wide inside rather than the standard 12 foot. And when it last changed hands 20 years ago, the slates on the back roof of the house were the biggest and thickest that the owners and their roofer and other builders had ever seen. Sadly, those that survived removal could not be reused as nothing could be found to match them. The few left are now stored in the ruined donkey shed.

Today Coomacrobeg is best known as a forestry district. Two or three smaller houses were apparently knocked down when the forest was planted in the mid 20th Century. This has left Coomacrobeg House standing alone on the edge of the forest, but surrounded mainly by meadows, nowadays vacant in winter but grazed in summer by cows and their calves. The forest was felled just before Covid, but has now been replanted. The garden is just over an acre and wild mountain hares visit frequently; for a while one suckled her leveret right in front of the sitting room window, at dusk every evening. A pine marten used to visit the garden too, but left when the forest was felled. On a clear night the stars are amazing.

The house cannot be seen from the public road. The elevated site has running streams on both southern and northern boundaries along with mature trees. It is accessed via a rural country laneway, and then a farm track up the mountain, and is within 12 minutes drive of Kealkill village where there is a Post Office with a shop. Part of the farm track is owned by the Forestry Authority, but most belongs to the farm and right-of-way agreements pertain.

Since the house last changed hands it has been substantially upgraded:

• ground source heat pump installed in a small stone extension built for the purpose onto the back of the house
• house re-roofed using good quality slate, fixed at both top and bottom (see below)
• house completely rewired
• interior insulation applied to most outside walls (see below)
• kitchen redesigned and re-equipped
• upstairs bathroom created
• basin installed in the downstairs lavatory
• the former downstairs bathroom is now a utility room housing sink, washing machine and refrigerator; shelves put into the shower are used to store vegetables and fruit
• the original single-glazed windows and the sitting room door have all been replaced with double-glazed hardwood ones made of Iroko (African mahogany), a hard, tough wood, very resistant to rot. See below for paint.
• all interior paint used has been low-voc.

Notes

In Ireland and the UK slates are fixed at the top: on the continent they are fixed at the bottom. But the roofer who renewed the roof at Coomacrobeg house prefers to fix them at top and bottom. His own house is done this way.

The kitchen has been fitted with carpenter-made kitchen units of very well-seasoned pine and oak worktops sealed with Le Tonkinois oil which is safe for worktops used for food preparation. The worktops now need sanding down and re-sealing in order to look as good as the worktop (of the same oak) supporting the basin in the bathroom. The equipment includes an induction hob, a self-cleaning oven (pyrolytic), dishwasher, microwave, and a mini fridge for the open butter, milk, cheese etc and for left-overs. There is a bigger fridge in the utility room. The freezer in the dairy is not working well and needs replacement. The plan was to buy a fridge-freezer and put it in the utility room to to replace both the old freezer and the fridge which is there now.

Great attention has been paid to insulation. Plasterboard insulated with expanded polystyrene was applied inside the exterior walls and this was then overlaid with hemp plaster about an inch thick. This is made by mixing hemp hurds into bonding plaster, which has glue in it. It is very strong, and durable and absorbs moisture from the air.

Some windows, and the door into the sitting room were replaced 11 years ago. The paint used was a ten-year system and did in fact last for 10 years, showing the first sign of needing attention just as the new windows were going in in April 2024. All of them were then painted with the same paint, the primer having been applied by the excellent firm that made them. However the door into the dairy is not of the same quality and is deteriorating. It is a softwood door, found unfinished in one of the barns and cut to fit. There was a plan to build a conservatory and if that had happened the door would have been quite adequate.

Looking at the front of the house you can see two front doors. The one nearest the garage opens into the biggest room, which would originally have been the kitchen (and the living room) because the big fireplace is there. The smaller room next door (now the kitchen) would have been the parlour, used perhaps as a quiet room and for entertaining important visitors. The second door you can see from outside opened into the dairy. It was still a dairy within living memory and someone who knew the house as a child remembers vividly how cold it was. A dairy has to be cold and this was achieved by building a flight of stone steps outside, to access a door in the upper storey (now a French window). Rubble would have been thrown into the space below the steps and this fine cold slab of masonry ensured that the dairy never heated up. The room, still called the dairy, is still a bit cold and there was a plan to build a conservatory encapsulating the steps and converting them into a heat store. In addition it would be a good idea to install underfloor heating in the dairy instead or as well as the current radiator. The heat pump can accommodate this as the possibility was considered when it was installed.

The stone outbuildings encircle the main residence and offer great potential for all manner of different usages. The large barn is in very good condition, having been re-roofed and re-floored about 10 years ago and fitted with work benches. (NB The roof timbers are strong enough to support slates if required.) The small barn to the left of this is sound, but the log store to the right lost its roof in a gale. The lofted store next to this needs a lot of work and the roof insulation stored in the large barn was bought with this in mind when the house roof was renewed. (It is designed to replace felt and give good insulation while allowing sufficient ventilation.) The garage is a good size and the ruined donkey-shed next to it could be a good source of stone for various jobs. The parking area and drive are muddy in the photos, after the wet winter, but have since been gravelled.