Clonganny House, Ballygarrett, Co Wexford
Description: Seven-bed period home with courtyard, outbuildings and gate lodge, in one or two lots (€825,000 without Gate Lodge).
Agent: Savills
Price: €950,000
I feel like I'm in an episode of Escape to the Country, driving along Co Wexford's leafy lanes, the green splashed fresh with recent rain, and sunlight glinting through. Small villages go by, country pubs, and everywhere fields rich with grass – because, as the farmers will admit, if you press them hard enough, Wexford has good land.
Clonganny House is a classic Georgian country house, symmetrical in design, a wide entrance hall giving onto a pair of rooms to right and left, with generous sash windows, open fires, and all the cornices, coving, skirting and architraves a purist could wish for. There’s also a further wing that runs on to the left of the main house. It was built by Hawtry White, a rather infamous local magistrate, who was declared an outlaw by the rebels of 1798. He evidently survived this label, as an inscription in the brick shows he built Clonganny in 1823.
It’s a generous house, with seven bedrooms, although the two at the very top level need a little work to completely finish them. The windows are huge, the walls thick, and the proportions gorgeous. The current owners, who are selling to move back to Dublin, now their children are college-age, bought the house in 1997, when it was difficult to see what they were actually getting behind all the clematis, wisteria and ivy that covered the façade. Perhaps that was a blessing to their enthusiasm, as, the owner tells me, “we didn’t think it would require what it required . . . But like any old house, once you start pulling at things, you don’t stop.”
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This “pulling” involved reroofing, replumbing, replastering, installing new timber sash windows, fixing the shutters, having the stunning curved staircase remade, restoring all the skirting boards from a scrap of the original found in the dining room, and rebuilding the redbrick courtyard outhouses.
We’re sitting in the stone-flagged kitchen, which has modern fittings, but a cosy sense of the old to it, drinking tea and looking out at the courtyard, which includes a barn, sheds, two stables, and two units that have been designed to function as separate apartments. There’s also an utterly charming two bedroomed gate lodge.
Outside, there’s a walled garden, orchard, mature trees, two paddocks (that could use a little reclaiming before the ponies can go in), woodland area, a tree house and a pond. A 20-minute drive from Gorey, and five minutes from Ballygarrett village, Clonganny is also just 10 minutes from the beaches at Ballinoulart and Old Bawn.
All that space, and those outbuildings seem to be calling for a large young family, or else someone dreaming of setting up one of those businesses people retreat to: cookery, painting, craft, yoga, you know . . . Clonganny is ready to walk into, but oh, the potential for more!
