Why Jeananne answered call to go into the west

Country Houses: The Old Rectory in Cleggan, Co Galway, looked ready to receive the last rites when Jeananne Crowley bought it. Now it's a warm and welcoming home in robust good health, says Robert O'Byrne

CAN HOUSES speak? Jeananne Crowley asks, rhetorically. "Because as soon as I walked through the door this one seemed to start talking, talking as if it couldn't stop. 'I've been waiting for you,' is what I felt it was saying."

Cleggan's Old Rectory was definitely waiting for someone to mount a rescue operation. Though solidly built in 1821 with thick walls and deep foundations, it was suffering from neglect by the time Jeananne came across the place in June 2000. She'd chosen to spend the summer in Connemara, swapping homes with local resident and fellow actor Kate O'Toole. "At the time, Kate was the only person I knew around here, I'd never had family holidays in Connemara, it was all new to me."

Coming across the Old Rectory, she feels, was a decisive moment in her life. "It's as if the house presented me with a choice: to change my way of life, change my habitat and enter an altogether new environment."

Following that first encounter, she answered the call of the west, bought the Old Rectory and put her large house in Dublin on the market.

It might have been wiser, though less romantic, to have sold the latter before buying the former, since the Dublin property took a while to find a new owner. "Which left me hugely strapped for cash," she now admits. "I didn't have any."

Nevertheless, having made her choice, she wasn't prepared to feel regret but left the capital, rented a house in Clifden for a year and got to know the area and its residents. Among early allies was Paddy Foyle of Clifden's Quay House. "Paddy said I should just move into the Old Rectory and live there by candlelight if necessary.

On the other hand, his brother Billy suggested I 'flatten it' and build a nice timber-framed dwelling entirely to my own specifications!"

Fortunately, she ignored this advice and the Old Rectory is now a tribute to her pluck and tenacity. Standing on rising ground about two kilometres outside Cleggan, the house has feverishly striking views of the West Connemara coastline and the Atlantic Ocean beyond.

While unquestionably beautiful, this must have been a fairly arduous posting for Church of Ireland clergymen in the 19th century. And their parishioners would always have been few; the church, constructed on a site immediately below the rectory, was demolished sometime in the 1920s and no trace of it remains.

The house's main front looks out to the sea, with deep sash windows designed to capitalise on this prospect. The double-cube drawingroom running the width of the house was once two rooms but now offers a fine, high-ceilinged space that is perfect for entertaining.

From here runs a corridor opening onto the other principal rooms, turned by Jeananne into her study, bedroom, dressingroom and bathroom. Their present comfort and warmth belies the pitiable state of the house just a few years before.

Then the Old Rectory - previously an occasional holiday home to a French fabric designer - suffered from rampant damp, an uncertain electrical system, no guttering, a badly leaking roof, outside water tanks and nothing to keep the place warm other than a couple of old storage heaters. "And the one working fireplace wasn't working," Jeananne is keen to point out. "Oh, and an army of rats had moved in."

If houses can speak, they can also die - and this one looked as though ready to receive the last rites.

The Dublin property eventually sold and the Old Rectory's recovery to full health was able to commence. It's been slow and is by no means complete. "This is still a work in progress," says Jeananne, adding "I'm now better informed about drains than any actress in Ireland; there's no more satisfying sound than that of water gurgling away."

Guttering has been replaced, floors restored, a decent electrical system installed and adequate heating provided; the Old Rectory has been given a much-needed facelift. Best of all, with Jeananne Crowley acting as surgeon it has acquired a new, beating heart: a spacious Amdega conservatory that links what was once the house's front door with its kitchen. A big, comfy sofa, book-laden dresser, well-scrubbed pine table and chairs; they all help to make this the house's social centre.

It helps that doors and window frames have been removed, allowing one space to flow through to another. So now the kitchen, with its Aga stove generating further heat, leads into the conservatory which, in turn, gives onto the hall that communicates with the drawingroom and study. The traditional formality of a 19th century interior has given way to a more contemporary insouciance in which defined roles have no place.

A similarly imaginative approach to the challenges of restoration has been taken elsewhere. Outside the original front door there used to be a patch of permanently damp grass. "When it rained," remembers Jeananne, "you just squelched across to get indoors." Today that same area is a stone-flagged sunken courtyard concluding in the conservatory's double-doors, waiting to be thrown open whenever weather permits.

Through the newly-constructed arch to one side is a vista of the garden created to grow fruit and vegetables. "It's very much a working garden," Jeananne confirms, sounding like a latter-day Felicity Kendal in The Good Life. "I decided if I were going to give up my urban existence, I'd have to do it properly."

The front of the house, meanwhile, has been likewise transformed. "I wouldn't have called it a garden," she says. "Land was a better word because it took a man with a machete to hack through it at first." Now there's a fine lawn that finishes with a screen of mature shrubs tough enough to offer protection from the harsh Atlantic winds.

Jeananne Crowley insists that, although she's already accomplished a great deal, this job's not over yet. Beyond the kitchen is an unattractive (if functional) 1960s flat-roofed bedroom extension that she longs to replace; architect Sam Stephenson has drawn up plans for a more appropriate alternative whenever funds permit.

In the short-term, "I need to do work on the shutters, that's on the list for next winter. Of course, the patina of age adds to the character and atmosphere of the house - but that can't be an excuse for idleness because I've got used to living here."

And, she insists, while a Dublin pièd-á-terre has been kept for whenever acting commitments require her presence in the capital, the Old Rectory is now where she lives.

"Of course sometimes I have to go away for work, but right from the start instinctively I knew this was no holiday home. If I was going to take it on, it would demand my constant presence, complete commitment and all the money I could afford to spend on a programme of gradual restoration. And more than restore, I wanted to revitalise and re-animate the house."

From being nigh unto death six years ago, Cleggan's Old Rectory today exudes an impression of robust good health.