Making a home in a holiday spot

These three families decided to leave busy city lives and to make traditional holiday spots their permanent homes

IT'S ONE thing visiting your holiday home at Easter or in the summer, but it's quite another taking the decisive step of actually moving into the house and the locality that has so far been a holiday playground and adjusting to the year-round rhythms of life in the slower lane.

With high prices concentrated in Dublin and the larger settlements, the price differential will always make it a viable option to sell big and buy small in a quieter location.

The ever-improving infrastructure in terms of broadband and roads, as well as cheaper air travel with a greater choice of destinations from regional airports, all add to the viability of living rural and still being able to work.

Originally from Liverpool, retired couple Roy and Joan Aitken have been coming to Ireland for decades.

In 1997, they bought the home that had been their beloved holiday base since 1971 and made the big move in 1998.

Both their daughter and son, as well as Joan's sister and her daughter, also moved across the Irish Sea. The Aitken's daughter and grandchildren live just 300m down the road in a rural area 1km outside the village of Durrus in west Cork.

In order to get over the problem of adapting a holiday home to one more conducive to year-round occupation, Roy and Joan simply knocked down the basic bungalow that was there and built a modern stone-cut property from scratch. Looking at the sweeping views of Dunmanus Bay and the Sheep's Head Peninsula from their home, it's easy to see why they were determined to spend their lives in this particular corner of paradise.

Eric and Aisling Farrell also moved to the Durrus area, but long before their retirement age.

The couple are in their late 30s and made the permanent move from Dublin to West Cork with their seven-year-old daughter Eri in 2003, having been visitors to the area for a number of years.

"When we first saw Bantry Bay, we fell in love with the place," says Eric. "It took a year to a year and half for us to get everything together and move down."

His is a carpenter by trade and was fortunate enough to find steady employment almost immediately. Aisling, who ran a Montessori school in Dublin, works at the local playschool.

Through the grapevine, they heard of a bungalow coming on the market which had been used as a holiday home.

"There was no central heating, basic electrics and a shallow well," says Eric. The price differential between their Dublin house and their Durrus home meant that they were mortgage-free and had enough money to upgrade the house to suit permanent living.

They redecorated from top to bottom, installed a deep-bored well, a pellet-burning central heating system and solar panels.

"It might," Eric surmises, "have been cheaper to have knocked the house down and start from scratch", as the Aitkens had done.

Neither Aisling nor Eric have a single regret in making the move, however: "It's one of the best things weve ever done."

Aisling says that what she likes most about life in West Cork is the pace: "Much slower and calmer, with time to recharge the battery every day. Or as Eric says: 'People don't argue as much in the country because there's too much to do'."

Minor inconveniencies aside (such as the lack of phone-in take-aways and certain aspects of their jobs), they dont miss anything about their previous existence in the Big Smoke. Gerry Bruton purchased a business as well as an abode when he made his move to West Cork from Dublin. He runs the Adrigole Arts craft shop on the Ring of Beara, close to the Healy Pass on the rugged Beara Peninsula.

A keen musician and sailor, he first came across the townland that was to become his home almost 10 years ago when his boat halted in Bantry Bay.

Although he was a regular visitor to West Cork, "We discovered Adrigole Harbour by chance when we were looking for a place to rest up having run aground."

He spotted the property in the Irish Times four years later, recognising the picture of it from his unchartered nautical adventure. "When I made the connection, I felt that I was meant to live here."

Whether or not it was fate, he has managed to assimilate himself into the community, with many people locally referring to him as Gerry Arts in the traditional West Cork manner of identifying people by their profession rather than by their surname.

There isn't anything in particular he misses about city life, although he does miss family and friends, but "my sister has bought a holiday home here and I get plenty of visitors during the summer.

"There are always pros and cons," says Gerry, "but the pros far outweigh the cons in my experience." He has a mooring just offshore and he can go sailing in the evenings, "I have one of the best sailing grounds in Europe at my doorstep".

The Farrell family have no problems fitting into a community that has an eclectic mix of local characters and varied nationalities, although Eric accepts that he'll be a blow-in "until the day I die; a fact that I'm reminded of it every time I walk down to Ross's pub in Durrus."

Similarly, Bruton says that he will always be known as "the guy from Dublin with the shop" but has been made feel very welcome: "If you're open and honest with people, 99 per cent of them will be nice back to you."

Coming from England has never posed any particular problems for Aitkens, whose children have grown up on happy memories of holidays in the place that's now home. They have been assimilating themselves into the landscape for over a quarter of a century.

"Our children grew up with the local kids and our daughter ended up marrying one of them!"