One in a Million

Inspired by her childhood holiday home, Katie and Dave embarked on finding one of their own. Luckily, a converted mill just outside Kinsale became available and it was love at first sight!

Katie lives in Cheshire, but her mother is a Cork woman, who went to University College Cork before traveling to England, where she met and married an Englishman and had six children. Looking after that lot must have been some job, especially in the school holidays, so she wisely decided to import the lot to Kinsale for the summers, where Katie and her siblings would have no end of things to do.

‘I loved it’, says Katie. ‘We had a holiday home in The Dock in Kinsale, the first holiday village in Ireland. Most families there were from Cork city and spent the summers in Kinsale. Everybody knew everybody and I made a lot of lasting friendships there.’ Katie grew up, qualified as a lawyer and married businessman and developer David McGoff, whose own mother’s family hailed from Mayo. ‘Dave always loved coming to Ireland, and even though his roots are elsewhere, he loved coming to Kinsale, where our family had so many connections.’ It wasn’t just Katie and her family who returned to Cork every year, her other five siblings loved it there too. ‘The family still had the house in The Dock, but sometimes everyone wanted it at once!’ says Katie.

The cottages had been knocked into one by the previous owner who, along with some badly finished modifications, had also fitted dormer windows that looked totally out of place in the period property. Over the years the beautiful stonework had been covered with layers of plaster both internally and externally. The windows were rotten, there was no insulation and there was dry rot in many of the timbers. The gardens also needed attention as they were completely over grown, both front and back.

Read more in the March issue…