ONE OF the finest country houses in the southeast has finally sold after three years on the market. Kilmurry House, near Thomastown Co Kilkenny has been bought by an Irishman living overseas who is relocating back to Ireland.

When it was offered for sale three years ago, in summer 2007, the listed Georgian house on 20 acres had an asking price of €4 million but failed to sell.

The price was subsequently reduced to €2.5 million. It is understood that the sale was agreed at close to the new asking price.

The vendors are banker John Casey and his wife Margaret who originally bought the property in 2003 but who are moving back to Dublin.

Sheppard’s auction house will hold a sale of the contents on the premises next Monday and Tuesday, July 12th and 13th to include furniture, pictures, classic-cars, garden and household effects.

Kilmurry House, which was previously owned by the late Dick Walsh, an Irish Timesjournalist, and his wife Ruth Kelly, has 1,245sq m (13,400sq ft) of accommodation including nine bedrooms and a ballroom.

Extra living space, which could be used as staff quarters, is provided in two separate, self-contained apartments with their own entrances off a courtyard.

The grounds include a two-acre walled garden, mature woodland, a small lake, and horse paddocks. The house is close to Mount Juliet and the new M9 Dublin-Waterford motorway which traverses Co Kilkenny.

The house was also once the home of the artist Mildred Anne Butler, one of Irelands most renowned watercolourists, who died in 1941. Celia Lamb, of Knight Frank, who negotiated the sale, said there had been “a good pick-up in sales of country houses”.

She said her agency sold six country properties “in recent weeks” – four to domestic Irish buyers and two to overseas buyers with connections to Ireland.