Co Cavan: €250,000What to buy this Christmas for the man who "has everything"? How about a little piece of heaven in "The Lake Country"? asks Michael Parsons
A Co Cavan fishing lodge on 1.8 acres by the lovely River Erne is for sale at not much more than the price of a top-of the-range Mercedes S-class. If you're shopping for a thoughtful tycoon rather than a toyboy-racer, then Ashgrove at Baker's Bridge, near the village of Butlersbridge, Co Cavan will capture his heart - hook, line and sinker.
The property is for sale by private treaty with an asking price of €250,000 and the joint agents are HOK Country in Dublin and O'Reilly, Taylor & Tweedy in Cavan.
Ashgrove, just 82 miles from Dublin and eight from Cavan town, is the perfect weekend retreat for anglers or for those who simply enjoy messing about on rivers. And with the current taboo on salmon angling, there is the added bonus that this piscatorial playground is most renowned for its coarse fishing and wild brown trout lake fisheries.
There's also pleasure-cruising on the nearby Shannon-Erne Waterway, excellent swimming at Annagh Lake and superb walking on the 16-mile-long Cavan Way (from Blacklion to Dowra). Enjoy the bracing air of the Cuilcagh Mountains as you wander though a landscape of mysterious lakes and pools, rocky streams, forest and bog, megalithic tombs, the "Calf's Altar" dolmen and a perfect picnic spot at Hanging Rock. Walkers will also see the remains of a traditional "Irish sauna". The "sweat house", last used in 1923, was a stone structure heated by a turf fire in which our sturdy forebears simmered before cooling off in a nearby stream.
If the very thought makes you shiver, then more sybaritic pleasures await at the nearby Slieve Russell hotel (think the Schloss Schönbrunn designed by Paddy The Plasterer) where 21st century beauty treatments include a "Salt Grotto" and "Herb Sauna". After all that, you may well have an appetite. Don't be put off by the twee name: "The Olde Post Inn" at Cloverhill was voted best restaurant outside of Dublin in 2006 by Dubliner magazine and there's a famous pub, The Derrygarra Inn, at Butlersbridge.
The entrance to the property is over Baker's Bridge, a delightful humpbacked stone crossing. This is a bridge of sighs, to evoke memories of haywains and Pooh-sticks. As A A Milne observed, if you "lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known".
The two-bedroom fishing lodge faces a meadow leading down to extensive water frontage on three sides, offering idyllic views over a broad curve of lake-like river teeming with roach, bream, pike and perch. On the opposite bank there is an ancient ash grove.
An ancillary building contains three large stores and a rowing boat - included in the sale. While Ashgrove is currently perfectly cosy and habitable, planning permission was granted this year to construct a substantial five-bedroom, 222sq m (2,388sq ft) house, incorporating the old house, on the site. The architect's design features a Moorish-style internal paved courtyard with an ornamental pool.
All this for a mere quarter-of-a-million euros? An amount for which Lotto players would not, apparently, get out of their recliners to collect? You may be thinking, and sorry about the pun, "where's the catch?" in this fishy tale. There isn't. Even if you were to buy this property and avail of the planning permission to build a lavish new house you'd still have enough change left over from €1 million (a sum which supposedly "doesn't cut it anymore") to buy that aforementioned car. Which, for the record, costs €205,000. Don't let this property be "the one that got away".
