TradeNames: The Sandhouse Hotel in Rossnowlagh has grown in tandem with the tastes of the tourism industry since the 1940s, writes Rose Doyle.

In a county of wild beauty and warm welcomes the Sandhouse Hotel in Rossnowlagh has more than its share of both qualities. Looking these days (and since a large 2001 development) not unlike a French chateau, it perches dramatically by its beach, a haven for travellers both weary and revelling since the 1880s when it was a modest fishing lodge.

Its latter day legendary status began in 1948 when it was bought by one Vinnie Britton, a Donegal man of formidable energy who married Mary Morrow, a Galway woman of formidable courage who, single-handedly and in difficult political times, pushed out the marketing boundaries for the Irish hotel business.

Their story is told by Brian Britton, eldest of the five sons Mary and Vinnie reared in Rossnowlagh while building and working together on the hotel which, last year, won the AA Inspectors' Award plus three red stars.

Brian, a chartered accountant, tells their story with all the precision and detail that is the hallmark of Donegal storytelling.

"My father bought what was then a thatched cottage bar with two-to-three B & B bedrooms from the Diver family in 1948. He'd left Donegal town to work in England when he was 14 and came back in his late 20s. He'd worked at building and in his sister Bride Hyland's Central Hotel in Donegal town.

"When the opportunity came to buy the Sandhouse Hotel in 1948 he did so - he paid £900. That first summer he just ran the bar."

While Vinnie Britton was running his thatched bar and getting a feel for being a hotelier, one Mary Morrow, having grown up in Lower Salthill, Galway, in her mother's B & B, was making her way around the country working for Powers Bookmakers. Sent to Rossnowlagh, she met Vinnie Britton. They married in 1949 and thereafter put their combined experiences to the building of the business together.

"My father built the hotel during the winters," Brian Britton remembers, "and ran the bar during the summers. I remember the winters as times of building, the summers as work. In the winter of 1951 he built an annexe across the road - a small café and shop selling confectionery plus six bedrooms. The thatched bar continued throughout.

"The big thing then was ham and tomato teas with bread and butter. That was the real treat if you came to the beach. They would serve 400 teas on a Sunday! This created the revenue to build during the winter."

He recalls another phenomenon of the times. "The Railway Bus used bring people from Northern Ireland, from Strabane and the hinterlands of Co Derry and Co Tyrone. Unfortunately, they closed it in 1957. It was simple economics: there were more cars on the roads by then."

The first major development happened in 1957, when eight bedrooms were built to the seaward side of the main house. To fund this Vinnie Britton worked for two winters as a foreman on a building site.

"Investments/developments got bigger by degrees," Brian remembers. "In those days you could build the shell and have enough money to furnish one floor. So they built the shell and opened the kitchen and diningroom on the first floor in 1957 with a big empty barn overhead! In 1958 they finished the second floor and in 1959 did the top floor."

The accountant in him wryly remembers another facet of the times. "There was the odd bank strike in between and my father, being a risk-taker, went over budget. He was summoned to the Ulster Bank in Belfast. My mother was more cautious."

The next large part of the hotel was added in 1961-62 - a year before Vinnie Britton had what would be the first of many heart attacks. "He was told to take it easy, that his time would be limited," his son says, "but he went on working. He had some 20 heart attacks and about 10 strokes in the years following, working, working through it all. When he died in 2002 he'd got 34 years of life he wasn't supposed to have."

But Vinnie Britton's initial heart attack had consequences. "To a certain extent my mother had to stop being a mother and become a businesswoman," Brian explains. "They had a family of five boys to raise."

Mary Britton, from the early to late 1960s, "built up a fantastic UK market. She went to the UK and built on contacts, bringing in a certain type of customer. The British prime minister Tony Blair, whose family came from Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, told of his holidays in the hotel when he spoke in the Dáil."

By 1969 Mary Britton was vice-president of the Irish Hotels Federation. Billy Kelly of Kelly's Hotel in Rosslare was its president. The Sandhouse Hotel - as a family destination - had become to Belfast what Kelly's was to the Dublin family market.

Then came 1969 and the long, cruelly brutal politics of violence in Northern Ireland. More than 70 per cent of the Sandhouse Hotel's market was "wiped out", according to Brian Britton. New markets beckoned - and Mary Britton followed them. "She was one of the first Irish hoteliers to go to the US marketing," her son points out, putting this in context with a special visit there in 1992.

"I went when she was acknowledged there with an award for being the first hotelier from Ireland to market in the US for 21 years. Getting on a plane in 1971 to go to the US and build up business took some guts! She was a pioneer and one of the people who helped develop a market for Irish tourism. Today, at 81, she's still got a sharp tongue and mind when it comes to the business.

"The 1970s and 1980s were very difficult in the Irish tourism business, especially where we're located. But we were lucky to have Tauck World Discovery - a US tour group - as a customer. They used us as their north-west base when touring places such as Dromoland and Ashford castles.

"By the time I got involved in 1992 we'd a very unusual spread of customer - 56 per cent from the US, 14 per cent from mainland Europe and the rest from Britain and Ireland."

During those years, too, a "very good staff team" built up in the hotel; three staff members last year were given 40-year service awards. Other staff members come from three generations of one family working for the hotel. With the local population of Rossnowlagh a modest 140, the hotel plays a not-insignificant role in the community.

"The ethos here is one of family welcome," Brian explains. "We greet everyone at the door and go around tables in the restaurant at night, talking to diners. The staff ethos is exactly the same. In the early days my mother built a reputation for good training here and many CERT trainees came, often meeting and marrying other trainees. We've 52 beds now and guests come back year after year.

"The last major investment was in 2001, just after 9/11 in New York. People said we were mad, that the US market was over, but my father insisted you invest in bad times for the good."

When time came to make decisions about the continuance and future of the hotel, the Britton family, in civilised fashion, sat down together to plan. The year was 1992, all five Britton sons had pursued individual life paths. Brian, the eldest, had been financial director for Goodman International during the 1980s. Conor, next in line, owns the Smugglers Creek, an award-winning Rossnowlagh restaurant. Barry has his own hospitality building design business. William went into shellfish farming. David is with Adam's Fine Arts Auctioneers in Dublin.

"We didn't want it to go out of the family," says Brian, "so we decided I had to buy it, there could be no splitting it up, and this had to be a majority stake. The hardest thing was that my parents would have to step back in terms of running things. My father was ill. Stepping back was particularly difficult for my mother."

Brian's son, Neil, is marketing manager in the Sandhouse Hotel; the lively general manager is Paul Diver (no relation of the family who sold the hotel to the Britton family in 1948). The plan nowadays is to "maintain the hotel as the number one four-star in the north-west," says Brian. "The 2001 investment in a spa means we're keeping ahead. We want now to impress on Dublin customers that we're only three hours up the road, only 70 minutes from Cavan."