So one of my readers wrote me a perfectly civil email to say that, much as they liked last week's three Borders properties, the post lacked my "usual storytelling, invented narratives and edges", adding: "I think people like you weaving tales and fantasies about the properties."
Fair point, I felt.
There is a technical tension in that the more properties I pick, the more pictures I then use, and the fewer words I'm allowed (on the Substack version, that is. Blogger let's me twitter on forever).
And because a property has to be pretty damn special for me to devote a whole post to it (e.g. this or this), I've drifted into thinking I need to show you a set of properties each week, increasingly three. Which puts me in that pictures v. words tension and so I find myself focusing on the information words. As last week.
But actually that's not the whole reason for my missing "tales and fantasies". I think maybe it's that it's also getting harder to hang onto the storytelling in a world that just seems just so cruel, so cold. Rewriting information about a house seems easier than imagining the lived lives that it housed and might hold again.
Sorry about the darker turn there, but at least you know this is me writing and not Muse, or Claude, or AIother.
Shall we look at a property?
Comeragh House is a very big house in the country. The country being county Waterford in Ireland.
It's had a bit of a rough time, and there's a seriously dodgy past we'll get to in a minute, but first some pictures of this quite gorgeous Irish dame.
The house was built in 1820 or so, possibly for John Palliser. He lived there sporadically and retired to it, dying there, in his library, after a long walk.
Palliser had been part of the wealthy Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry hoovering up the 'big houses' and land wealth of Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries.
A charming adventurer who'd failed to finish university or apply himself to work in Ireland, he traveled to the wildlands of North America and Canada in the 1850s, exploring, hunting with his white, half-wolf dog, leading expeditions and meeting with First Nations groups as a fellow hunter and horseman. There's a great piece by Eamonn McKee on Pallister and more here on his place in Canadian history.
He died without marrying and the house, along with other family properties eventually passed via a niece to the Fairholme family.
In the 1920s, Comeragh House became one of the 275, mostly Protestant-owned, country houses targeted for destruction by the IRA during the Civil War. It was torched in 1923, Pallister's papers and house records burning with it, but rebuilt by the Fairholmes in 1925, according to its Heritage listing.
There's a long gap and then Comeragh is bought in 1964 by Pieter Menten, a wealthy Dutch art collector, and his wife.
They lived in splendid isolation on their Irish estate for a decade before Menten is revealed as a Nazi war criminal linked to the deaths of Polish Jews.
He's tried and jailed in Holland and, while this is going on, Comeragh House is torched again - this time reputedly by Israeli Mossad agents rather than the IRA; Menten's art collection having already disappeared.
After his death in 1987, Menten's wife puts the now pretty-wrecked estate up for sale and it's bought by a champagne-loving English couple who spend seven years restoring it to glory. Much of what they did - the glorious bathroom ceilings, the richly-painted rooms, is still there. Of sorts.
They put in on the market in 2011 for an optimistic 3m euro and, whatever it eventually sold for, its new owners don't seem to have shared the renovation drive, given how much has drifted into disrepair.
Now it's up for sale at just 850k euro (around £720k) - all 22 rooms, stables, steward's house, stone outbuildings, and 40 (yes, 40) acres of estate.
This is the sort of beefy renovation project that you pitch to Channel 4.
This is also a very beautiful house in a very beautiful part of coastal Ireland that's had a bit of a rough life - two too many attempts to burn it down and long periods of being left behind. Fingers crossed it finds owners rather than investors.
On the market through Sherry Fitzgerald at 850k euro. More on the agent's site here and on Rightmove here.
Obviously, this comes next...
