Ardsallagh House (front of house, facing onto the River Blackwater) circa 1940.
Ardsallagh House
(front of house, facing onto the River Blackwater) circa 1940.
Entry for Ardsallagh House in NUIG's Landed Estates Database; Ardsallagh House on Google Maps.
Some time ago, I was bitten by the family history bug, and went digging. A few generations back, our family were basically miscellaneous peasants, and thus didn't appear in the news of the day even when they died. As a means of gathering more information, I took to investigating those who did make it into the papers, including a family who once owned the land occupied by the house I grew up in. I've picked up information from a lot of sources on this place, so I thought I'd write up what I've found for more public consumption (and hey, maybe some other people out there have some data they can send on.)
Ardsallagh House first makes an appearance in the Freeman's Journal, July 1832, when we are told that, "Dominick Ronayne and family decamp[ed] from Upper Rutland Street to Ardsallagh". Note, this doesn't refer to Ardsallagh House specifically, and several Ronaynes lived in the area; however, up to this point, Dominick Ronayne was living in Ringville, his father's house near Dungarvan, and in 1833 reference is made to Ardsallagh being "his seat near Youghal", so I think it's a reasonable assumption.
T. Lacy, in Sights and Scenes in Our Fatherland (1863) describes the house as, "a nice, fanciful structure".
Ronayne occupied the house until his death in January 1836, and his funeral cortége (comprised, so the reports of the day said, of some 100,000 mourners) followed a route from the gates of Ardsallagh House along the banks of the Blackwater to Youghal Bridge, and from there onward to Clashmore.
Two of Ronayne's children, Tobias and Ellen, predeceased his wife Olivia (née Sinnott, died 1856), but a third child, James, appears from the Cancellation Books to have inherited the property around this time. Olivia's entry in the Will Calendars makes no reference to this transfer explicitly, only mentioning John Ronayne "of the same place ... the surviving Executor. John was a first cousin once removed of Dominick, and a second cousin of James; confusing matters further, John's father was also James. James-of-Dominick died in October 1876 - almost exactly 20 years after his mother - and in the 1877 Cancellation Books the property had passed to John. Interestingly, Olivia's will was not proved by John until 1879, so perhaps there was a tussle over ownership?
In any event, John lived in the house until his death in 1885, and conducted a good deal of business with the town of Youghal (as a council member) using Ardsallagh House as his official address. After his death, the house passed to his wife, Alice, (daughter of Francis Kennedy of Ballinamultina House, Clashmore) who possessed it until her death in 1906; by 1908 ownership had passed to her son James Francis. James was the owner and principal resident until his death in 1945; the property briefly passed to his brother Robert, who died later in 1945, and ultimately to their sister Gwen - the last of the Ardsallagh Ronaynes. She passed away in 1961, at which point the property was handled by trustees (Stephenson, possibly a cousin or in-law of the family); it appears to have been sold to a solicitors' firm in Dubln in 1963 who sold it on to the Koerner family in 1965.
At this point it seems that the house had fallen somewhat into disrepair, and the Koerners initially sought to renovate it; however, not being local to the area, they were quoted an assortment of exorbitant prices and ultimately found it cheaper to demolish the main building and replace it with a brand new construction circa 1967. The stables and some other non-residential buildings remained intact and were used by the Koerners as farm buildings, and they built an additional house for their son on the propery. They sold the entire property some time around 1999, and since then, the various buildings have gradually fallen into disrepair. As of September 2015, the land is for sale, and the description notes that "There are two dwelling houses on the land and numerous outbuildings, all of which are derelict. One property is known as Ardsallagh House and another as Harbour View."
Sources: The Irish Newspaper Archive, the newspaper archive at Find My Past, the National Archives of Ireland Calendars of Wills and Administrations website, some personal contacts via and including my father.