Away with the fairies: Galway idyll for €660,000

Two traditional thatched cottages have a quirky appeal and a name to match: Fairybridge House & Cottage stand on about a third of an acre of pretty gardens a mile outside Oughterard, Co Galway, not far from Lough Corrib. Run as a B&B and cottage rental over the past 24 years, the property is now for sale for €660,000 through DNG Martin O’Connor.

When owner Mary Faherty and her late husband David Smith bought the over 260-year-old cottages in 1993, the property needed complete renovation. In 1995, they opened the larger, three-bedroom cottage as a B&B and rented out the smaller one-bedroom cottage, getting some rave reviews on Trip Advisor. A small bridge a few hundred yards away which folklore associates with fairies gives the property its name.

Outside, both cottages are whitewashed, with red-painted half-doors and red window trims, decorated with wagon wheels. Inside, the main house is approximately 120sq m (1,300sq ft), the smaller cottage, 37sq m (400sq ft). Both have exposed stone walls and beamed ceilings, and are decorated with lots of old artefacts and furnishings.

There is also a mobile home on the site included in the sale: Mary – who is originally from Manchester – moved out of the large house after her husband died five years ago, and is now planning to move on altogether. Her immediate plan is to spend the winter in Fuertaventura.

The main cottage – which Mary calls “the mothership” – has an open-plan livingroom/diningroom, a solid fuel stove in the original open fireplace, a kitchen/breakfastroom – with brightly painted cupboards – and three bedrooms, two of them en suite. There is also a shower room.

The smaller cottage has an open plan livingroom/diningroom/kitchen and shower room downstairs, and a ladder to a loft bedroom.

Both have stone floors, mains water, septic tanks and oil-fired central heating. The roofs were re-thatched in 2007 and are not hard to care for, says Mary: the “cap” – the ridge on top – just needs to be replaced every seven to 10 years “depending on the weather”.

Outside, the gardens are filled with flowers, greenery and “little grottos where you may sit and soak up the atmosphere”, says agent Martin O’Connor. Both he and Mary believe that someone could buy it as a family home, or run it as a B&B, or possibly “as a restaurant-type place”, says Mary.

Mary and her husband David moved from Manchester to Oughterard because “my daddy, my grandparents were from Oughterard, it was like home to me”. David, whose first wife was the sister of Myra Hindley, brought the Moors Murderers’ killing spree to an end when he went to the police in 1965 after witnessing Hindley and her partner Ian Brady killing a man. “I’m very proud of him,” says Mary. “He was accepted in Oughterard for who he was.”