Saturday, 13 August 2022 | 14.5°C Dublin

W hen the McGuires bought their dream holiday cottage, they discovered that a river ran through it

View from the deck at Lough Talt

A view of the house, the lake and the mountain

The lake room with its gallery library

The half-door entrance to the original cottage

An external view of the house showing the decks

The kitchen at Lough Talt

A sleeping space in the cottage’s original loft

Lough Talt, Aclare, Ballymote, Co Sligo Asking price: €595,000 Agent: Savills (01) 6181300

I n the 1970s when Irish summers were scorchers and Ivan McGuire was a young lad, his parents would take the south Sligo-based family to the beach at Enniscrone on summer Sundays. But as they got older, Ivan and his brother developed a passion for trout fishing on the fly.

So from his mid-teens, on their way to the seaside, his parents would drive from their home at Bunnanadden and drop the brothers and their fly rods off at Lough Talt, Ballymote and then collect them on the way back from Enniscrone. “We’d just lose ourselves all day on the water,” says Ivan.

Decades later in 2000 when Ivan and his wife Nora (now based in Kilkenny) decided they wanted a holiday home somewhere in south Sligo, they stopped their camper van one day by a ‘for sale’ sign they had spotted by the side of that so familiar lake.

A view of the house, the lake and the mountain

Ivan and his son climbed over a gate and walked down to a traditional Irish cottage. “The weather was so bad that Nora stayed in the camper. But despite it, we all decided there and then ‘this is it.’” The ‘it’ was not only a cottage, at the time being sold by an English national, but 11.5 acres of land, most of it directly skirting the scenic lake flanked by the majestic Crummus mountain in the midst of the great Ox range that runs 40 miles through Sligo to the Mayo border with Knockalongy as its highest peak (1,785 feet).

They bought the house, which was originally thatched, but had been slated by its English owner. But it was clear that it needed some work.

“This was a traditional cottage dating from about 1900. A local family had farmed the land and raised seven children in it. It was one room and a kitchen with a loft where the children used would sleep.

“It’s built in a typical Sligo style with the front door opposite the back door and what’s called an ‘outshot’ by the chimney. This nook would house a settle bed and this is where the parents of the family would sleep,” says Ivan.

The lake room with its gallery library

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The McGuires found out about some of that work required on an early rainy night staying over.

“It was about three in the morning when the lads came into the bedroom and told us we’d better take a look at what was going in the kitchen. There was what could only be described as a stream, inches deep, coming in one door, running across the kitchen and out the other.

“It turned out the previous owner had relocated the site entrance and covered over a stream. He had put in it a pipe that couldn’t take heavy rainfall, so when the rain flow was high, it just diverted and ran through the house.”

After putting a few things right, the couple used their cottage for two years to get a feel for it before deciding how to extend it. And their two boys, Ken and Gary, were soon fly fishing around the lake for its famed wild brown trout and perch.

The half-door entrance to the original cottage

“We needed a lot more space and particularly a big room that could take full advantage of the views over the lake and Crummus,” says Ivan. “I sketched out a few ideas and took them to an architect. The extension was built between 2002 and 2004. We did our very best to have it blend with the original house and its surrounds.”

The McGuires added a two-storey wing which increased the accommodation by 75pc while still maintaining the original cottage as it is. “People said, ‘I suppose you’re going to knock it down,’ but how could you? It’s a part of the landscape.”

The centre of the new wing of the house is the ‘lake room’ with a double-height panel ceiling and beams of machine milled Douglas Fir. There are floor-to-ceiling windows facing the lake and mountain in an apex reflecting the roof. “There was a ruined cow shed. I made sure to reuse every one of those stones for the new part of the house.”

The flagged limestone floor acts as a storage heater, absorbing the sun’s rays during the day and releasing that heat in the evening. Upstairs looking down is a library gallery to house the McGuires’ extensive book collection.

An external view of the house showing the decks

The family added a great big wrap-around outdoor raised deck facing the lake for sitting out on summer evenings.

Even back in 2004, Ivan was thinking about energy saving. “We looked into geothermal heating and we sunk the grid in the land near the house, running out in fingers about a metre and a half deep. It’s absolutely brilliant.

“We have solid wood stoves but with the geothermal, they’re now just for effect really. We get the hot water and a nice even ambient temperature in throughout the house all day.”

The house has a C rating, which would be much higher if the couple had insulated up the original cottage portion. “We couldn’t do that,” say Ivan. “It would have changed it completely.”

The extension also added two more bedrooms, an upstairs screen room for movies, a bathroom and their library. Now the house spans a spacious 2,196 sq ft and outside includes a range of useful outbuildings including an adjoining turf shed, workshop, storage shed and timber shed and there’s also a detached boat house to avail of the direct lake frontage.

Since acquiring the property the family have fished, swam in the lake, sailed on the lake and hiked around the area (the lake is the starting point for the Sligo Way walk which runs to Dromahair in Leitrim) and there’s also a designated 4.5k walk which skirts around Talt.

Ivan even started paragliding. “The wind deflects off the mountain and creates uplift. So you’d climb up the mountain, take off, fly around in figures of eight until you got tired, fly back to the top of the mountain, have a Mars bar and a breather and fly away again. It’s spectacular.”

Nora adds: “This is a magical place to live. There are so many wonderful walks around here and I walk a lot, especially around the lake or up the bog road.

“Waking up every morning to such a beautiful view just sets you up for the day. One of my favourite things to do is to walk down the fields, especially in May when the bluebells are in full bloom. I always love the arrival of the cuckoo in April.”

But the McGuires were having so much fun at the lake that this began to create a dilemma.

The kitchen at Lough Talt

Both were based in Kilkenny for their jobs, Nora as a reflexologist and Ivan running his own electrical engineering automation business.

“One day, Nora said to me, ‘do you know what? I want to stay here.’ I said ‘but I have a business in Kilkenny’, and she said, ‘well that’s up to you’. At this stage the boys were in their teens and out of school. So I could base myself in Kilkenny from Monday to Thursday and come back here on Thursday evenings.”

And so, by a process of evolution, the house at Lough Talt was gradually transformed from being the McGuires’ holiday home to becoming their primary residence. Eventually they cut ties with the city altogether when they sold their Kilkenny home to one of their boys.

Nora adds: “My favourite space is the room overlooking the lake. I love sitting in this room reading and listening to music or to just sitting and watch the beautiful scenery change in front of your eyes, at certain times of the year you can experience the four seasons here in one day and there’s always something different to see.

A sleeping space in the cottage’s original loft

“Christmas is always magical here with the fire stoves lit and our family here. I love that I can stand at the kitchen sink and look right through to the living room and out to the lake. Ivan plays traditional Irish music so I’ve super memories of the house full of music.”

The one-kilometre square lake has been occupied since ancient times. It has two crannogs on it and is home to a range of endangered species including the Arctic char, an indigenous Irish fish related to the salmon; the European eel; and the white clawed crayfish.

“We harvest our own turf from our land,” says Ivan. “But we learned that despite the boggy ground this was once a farm with meadows, oats, cattle and chickens.”

Tubercurry (9 miles) is the nearest town, Ballina is 10 miles away and Enniscrone with its beach is 13 miles distant.

But now life has come full circle for the McGuires. “We spent Covid lockdown here and our grandchildren are in Kilkenny,” says Ivan. “We really want to spend more time around them so now we’ve bought a house in Inistioge. We really hope a family moves in here full time. It’s such a special place.”

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