SELLING Wicklow’s vastly upgraded Coningbeg Cottage as a rustic yet accessible lifestyle home, auctioneer Anna Thornton enthuses about the peaceful setting and the sweetest of seasonal birdsong.
Might she mean the sound of The Fynches? They’re an Irish band with deep family roots, and who are finessing their first album to be released in November in this musical home’s adjacent recording studio, and in West Cork where they regularly both gig and record.
The couple had bought a Land Commission 1930s era cottage, which grew with them as their family also expanded to four young creatives: both generations now have had a gravitational pull to West Cork. Folks Mick and Toni are downsize home- hunting around Clonakilty, swapping the east coast for the south-west, while their offspring have worked, gigged, and lived troubadour musicians lives in and around Clonakilty.
It’s guided at €825,000 by DNG Thornton who started first viewings last week, primarily to Dublin families who also want a lifestyle shift close to the capital, just off the M11 and near Rathnew, Wicklow town, and Ashford.
While Mick commuted to Donnybrook’s RTÉ studios, she gave music and singing lessons at this hub of activity, including opera lessons to internationally acclaimed Ava Dodd, while bands like Hudson-Taylor, Gabrielle Aplin, and I have a Tribe “have also passed through to drink at the well, or swim at local beaches”.
Youngest son Ferdia and Fynches frontman was born here, and apart from the band has an acting career that most recently saw him filming the forthcoming Four Letters of Love with Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham-Carter and Gabriel Byrne — whose career also started in Wicklow’s more fictional Glenroe.
Swallows of the feathered kind enhance and enrich the garden “a place of recreation and nourishment, it’s been a passion with organically grown veg plus our hens’ eggs have never disappointed. Now it’s a new chapter for us: needs have changed and new pastures (and, new veg patches) beckon,” Toni chimes.
