Hidden lodge in hills of Connemara

There are lakes to fish and mountains to climb at Fermoyle Lodge, a Co Galway country house on 10 acres. Michael Finlan reports.

Since the turn of the century, Fermoyle Lodge has been lost in splendid isolation amid the mountains and lakes of the Connemara wilderness.

Built around 1875 as a sporting lodge for the Berridge family of Ballynahinch Castle, it lies low in a hollow on the winding road from Oughterard to Casla, a proud granite and brick pile amid sub-tropical trees and flowers looking out across terraces to Fermoyle Lake and the peaks of the Twelve Bens above the Atlantic.

Currently run as a guest-house, it is for sale by private treaty throughJackson Stops for around €2 million.

From the western terrace outside the diningroom on clear evenings you can see the sun sink like molten gold into the ocean beyond the Aran Islands, and when mists shroud the surrounding countryside, the distant mountains are etched like ghostly forms across the horizon.

This is indeed the kind of country home that people dream of: an idyllic haven shut away from the outside world with lakes and rivers to fish for salmon and trout, vast acres of open moorland for shooting game, hills and mountains for climbing, rustic bothareens for walking and beaches and breakers for swimming and sailing.

For the past eight years, Nicola Stronach and her husband Jean-Pierre Maire have lived in Fermoyle Lodge, and after sensitively renovating it without any loss of its Victorian character, have run it as a guesthouse with an intimate home-like ambience. It has won accolades around the world as far away as Japan, with appellations like "glorious" and "magnificent" recurring in international magazines, newspapers and guide books. This year it has been named the Country House of the Year in the Jameson Guide.

The house, on about 10 acres of land, includes some grazing and also has shooting rights over 4,370 acres of surrounding countryside. A central part of the maintained garden is an ornamental pond surrounded by a profusion of trees, shrubs and flowers including a bower leading up to the gate-lodge at the entrance to the main house.

Among the exotic shrubbery are many specimen rhododendrons including a number of giant-leafed ones that were planted in the 1920s.

The front door opens onto a reception hall that has a fireplace with a pine chimney-piece. Also downstairs is a study with a fireplace, a drawingroom with an Adams-style carved marble chimney-piece, a morning room, kitchen and capacious diningroom with French doors onto the west terrace.

There are five en suite bedrooms upstairs, all with fine views, and two other en suite bedrooms in a stone-fronted mews attached to the house. The three-bed gate-lodge has an entrance hall, sittingroom and kitchen. Fermoyle Lodge is 10 miles from Oughterard, six miles from Costello/Casla and 27 miles from Galway City and its airport. A wide variety of game shooting is available at Fermoyle; fishing is by arrangement on the Fermoyle Lake and Costello fisheries and on Lough Corrib.