Show me the way to go home? Head up by the beacon

0.75 acre, FPP for 1,750 sq ft new build Container House For Living

Y OU’LL have little problem directing callers to this West Cork house site — just tell them it’s one of the very last sites, if not the very last entrance, on the road out to Baltimore’s much-photographed harbour-mouth sentinel, the Beacon.

A new-year sale listing, and yet to be built upon, this 0.75-acre site is off a twist in the cul-de-sac route out from the village of Baltimore and an inlet known as The Cove, to the 19th century beacon which faces over the eastern approach to Baltimore harbour, facing a lighthouse on SherkinIsland.

Built in the mid-1800s to replace an earlier signal/warning, the stone-built beacon is painted white from top to bottom, regularly whitewashed to refresh it, and has the nickname ‘Lot’s Wife’ after the Book of Genesis story of the woman turned to a pillar of salt for looking back on the destruction of Sodom.

Cork’s Lot’s Wife looks more benignly over one of two ways into and out of the sheltered and scenic harbour for sailors and ferries and boats heading out round the Fastnet, with the 50ft high beacon a lure for landlubber visitors to Baltimore too, given its elevated viewing perch.

The walking route out from The Cove is about a kilometre, with a small number of one-off houses thinning out along the way, and this three-quarter acre site is thus a rarity given it’s out at the very far end where further, future plannings are likely to be rarer than water hens’ teeth.

Full planning permission for a one-off, four-bed, low-slung, single-storey, slight V-shaped home of 1,750 sq ft was granted as recently as April 2022, so there’s a good length of time left (four more years) to run for a purchaser to build and complete. The site also allows for a detached, stone-clad garage or boathouse, big enough for a RIB — or open topped sports car, as might suit a future occupant’s lifestyle.

Plans were drafted by city-based architect Tom Hegarty, with various extended members of that family noted in the design profession linked for decades to Baltimore and some of its best sited summer homes by The Cove.

This site is for sale with estate agent Maeve McCarthy of Charles P McCarthy in Skibbereen with a €300,000 AMV, and likely build costs (despite the seeming simplicity of the house design) may well top a further €300,000 — as much as €500,000, perhaps, including the boathouse?

Ms McCarthy last year sold an upgraded home nearby at The Cove: she got a very strong €1.04m (according to the Price Register) for 2 Dunleary, a semi-detached four-bed rebuilt, extended and upgraded home of c 2,000 sq ft, facing the water.

With a zinc-clad side wing designed by architect Peter Murphy of Frank V Murphy, No 2 had come for sale in the past year with an €895,000 AMV. It had previously sold in 2017 for a recorded €345,000, before its contemporary makeover.

This chance to build from scratch allows for a muted design with slight splayed floor plan with open plan kitchen/living dining at one end with corner window, adjacent bedroom four/home office/den by a bathroom and in the other angled section are three further bedrooms, two of them en suite.

External finishes are painted render, dark roof slates or tiles, and some timber by the entrance with stone cladding on the boathouse closer to the road, while there’s a more private patio area on the far side of the house near one other larger two-story contemporary house.

VERDICT: No looking back for some lucky purchaser on the way up to Lot’s Wife.

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