Two Welsh properties for runaways

In 1779, Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby ran away together and set up home in a Welsh valley.
Irishwomen from aristocratic backgrounds, Sarah was escaping a male guardian's harassment and Eleanor her family's plans to marry her off.
Instead, they chose freedom, giving up inheritances to live happily together until their deaths in a house they renovated and a garden they grew.
You might suppose that, in the 18th century, the couple would have been ostracised but the reverse was true. Their home, Plas Newydd near Llangollen, became a haven for visiting artists and poets, radical thinkers and royalty. The Duke of Wellington was a regular, as was Lord Byron, Josiah Wedgewood, William Wordsworth dedicated a sonnet: "Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb / Ev’n on this earth, above the reach of time".
The Ladies of Llangollen inspired poets and writers in their lifetime, playwrights and TV producers in ours and the outsiders haven they built is now open to the public.
Albeit the ladies' mock gothic embellishments were 'augmented' by a later owner's mock Tudor.

Plas Newydd in c1875

And post- Gen. John Yorke

The ladies attached poetry to trees and showcased oak carvings from broken up pews; the General added a mock Tudor facade and collections of global oddities. Houses change and are changed by each owner. It's why we buy them; it's why, particularly, we buy wrecks and do-ups. We renovate, rebuild, decorate, reshape homes and gardens as expressions of who we were then.
The first wreck I've picked for you (top and below) is the closest I could find to the Llangollen ladies' Welsh haven.
And it's not a wreck, more tired (but I suspect some hidden issues in those old walls), but it does date from 1761 and would have been lived in during Lady Eleanor and Sarah's time.

The three-bedroom detached cottage is a couple of miles from the village of Chirk, just over the England/Wales border, and around 13 miles from Plas Newydd.
On a hill overlooking farmland (with a farm as near neighbour), Crogan Wladys comes with almost half an acre of sloping garden land to play with.
Downstairs is a large, open-plan kitchen-diner, separate utility room, good-size lounge and snug, both with woodburners. Upstairs is the bathroom and three bedrooms. 

A stairlift, handrails, portable heaters tell its owners' story of who they are now. 
Outside is a small stone barn and steps down to an underground cellar (bunker?), and a greenhouse. Plus quite wonderful views.
On the market at £425k via Morris Marshall Poole. Details and more pictures on the agent's site here and on Rightmove here.
My second pick is one of the prettiest Welsh chapels I think I've come across. However, as the £75k price tag suggests, Seion Chapel, in Rhiwlas, doesn't come with planning permission - that would be your first task.

Two rooms - the chapel hall and a good-size vestry at the side, it's been on the market for much of this year. Which is a bit of a concern given that prettiness (I particularly love the hand-decorated walls) and the lovely rural views and peaceful setting. Perhaps the energy park plans are impacting, or perhaps Powys' planning officers have already been consulted on its residential likelihood?

Outside space is limited, basically the two areas behind the railings, but the views are what matter.
On the market at offers over £75k via Roger Parry. More on the agent's site here and on Rightmove here. 

Large and small wrecks in the Dales

I should start by admitting that I've never visited the Yorkshire Dales, at least not intentionally.
I'll have passed through it of course, maybe enroute to a holiday further north, or on school bus on a trip to some caverns or such, but I've yet to do the cosy Dales cottage stay.
Which feels a bit bad given that I'm from Yorkshire and have lived in one or other of its four counties much of my life.
Maybe it's all those gently rolling hills - I'm more of a squally seas or boho city vibe type of woman.
Or it's the sheep - all that staring; their silent judging.

I have two Dales properties to show you this week. Both on the scary side renovation-wise, and carrying a bit of a rolling hills/surfeit of tearooms price hike. 
This first one I got halfway through uploading pictures and then realised I recognised it and, sure enough, I'd featured it earlier this year in a post about proper wrecks.
At that stage it was on the market for £180k and I'd thought it weird that only the wreck of a farmhouse was up for sale, not its (very) near neighbour the barns.
Anyway, clearly that didn't fit well in a market swollen with former holiday cottages after the tax break for furnished holiday lets closed in April. So the owners of Potgill, in Garsdale, decided to package up the three-bedroom abandoned farmhouse with those neighbouring barns and a more generous portion of land and put the expanded bundle on the market.
However, even the promise of a large stone house, barns, plus 0.3 acres, with good access, in an extraordinarily beautiful part of the National Park is struggling to find a buyer willing to take on the level of work needed, and the price of the package was reduced last week to OIRO £250k.
Those factors - the enlargement, the negotiable price, are why I'm showing you Potgill a second time.
Here's some pictures, although none of the barn I note which, given the repackaging, seems a bit lax? I'm going to assume the vendor is a farmer who is refusing to clear the barns of his stacks of just-in-case wood and rusting tractor spares until he absolutely has to. Or maybe there are sheep in there... 

So, those are the pretty bits. Note the beck running through part of your land - there is no water or services to the farmhouse itself (at least, not any longer) so that beck may become important. 
Here are the less pretty bits. The farmhouse has a large kitchen, walk-in pantry, living room, and what was a laundry room downstairs, and three bedrooms and what had once been a bathroom upstairs.

On the market at OIRO £250k through Armistead Barnett. Details and more pictures on the agent's site here and on Rightmove here.
The next property brings the cute factor. A one-room former chapel in the North Yorkshire Dales village of Threshfield, just across the River Wharfe from Grassington.

I'm a bit bothered that the chapel is being marketed as two bedrooms and one bathroom when it has neither - it's just one room with a sectioned-off kitchen area.
Nor does it have planning permission to turn it into a home or add those missing rooms. Laziness or opportunism from the agents?

It is however a pretty building sitting in its own (small) garden area and backing onto open fields and lovely hill views.
The village has all the basics (pub, coffee shop, fire station, school, garage, Spar shop round the corner, Mayor-led Town Investment Plan and quango-led Local Plan).

Do sound out Dales' planning officers (Threshfield is part of Craven, covered by the South team officers) about the likelihood of getting change of use to residential before you consider making an offer on that £125k guide price.
On the market through Dacre, Son & Hartley - details on their website here and on Rightmove here.

Anyway, back to sheep and that creepy stare thing they do - sometimes it's a warning to run.

 

A very big (cheapish) house in the country

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...