‘My living room used to be a church’ –
€1.85m restored parochial house for sale in Meath

Asking price: €1.85m

Agent: Sherry FitzGerald Country Homes (01) 23763000 and Sherry FitzGerald Davitt & Davitt (044) 9379988​

Not many of us can say that our living room was once an entire church.

College Hill House in Slane, Co Meath, was long the parochial house for Rathkenny, with an adjoining former chapel which has since been transformed by its current owner into the home’s most spectacular room.

Eileen O’Grady has made the most of the 3,864 sq ft property’s ecclesiastical features, especially the chapel, with its marble-panelled walls and cathedral-style ceiling.

The chapel is entered through a porch complete with marble holy water font embedded in a wall featuring a colourful stained-glass window.

“Light flows into it,” says O’Grady. “The ceilings are about 14ft high, with beautiful wooden panels. We’ve built bookcases just all along one wall painted in the tone to match the marble. The decor of the church area is very much defined by the marble.”

Some church features don’t suit day-to-day living, such as the typically high-mounted windows that stop congregations looking out and being distracted during sermons.

The O’Gradys fixed that by lowering the windows, while retaining their arched tops. An alcove for a confessional has been repurposed to house a washing machine that cleans clothes rather than souls.

And the downstairs loo features another holy water font embedded in the wall as a most unusual bathroom feature.

One feature which they had to remove was the huge iron cross mounted on the roof.

“There was something strange about having a cross 5ft tall on the roof. We had it taken down and repaired and mounted in the garden instead,” she says.

O’Grady also learned that College Hill House had its own ‘Len Brennan’ Father Ted moments in its parochial-house days thanks to her encountering its one-time Mrs Doyle.

“We got to know the former housekeeper, who (pointing to the drawing room) said ‘that’s the bishop’s dining room’ because when the bishop would come, everything would have to be perfect for him,” says O’Grady.

Many Georgian homes were designed so servants could live separate private lives. And so too were priests separated from their housekeepers.

The housekeeper staircase at College Hill House went directly from what’s now the dining room up to what was the housekeeper and her children’s quarters.

There was no access between the housekeeper’s upper quarters and those of the resident priests, which are all on the first floor and now en suite.

Once, a workman fled the premises during renovations when he was told, as a joke, that he’d disturbed a priest’s tomb. This was actually just the foundations of a greenhouse.

College Hill House is located a few fields away from the Hill of Tara and Newgrange, the epicentre of pre-Christian religious events.

This is also where St Patrick is said to have introduced Christianity. Local parish records report that St Erc was “appointed by St Patrick and given jurisdiction over Rathkenny”.

This later passed to another disciple, Saint Cianan, to whom St Patrick was supposed to have bestowed his iconic crozier.

Catholic persecution in the 17th century was personified by the gruesome end of Meath cleric Oliver Plunkett, who appointed the local Rathkenny curate just before being arrested and hung drawn and quartered.

Parish records report that “having obtained the farm of 14 acres from Lord Fingal (a close relative of the Plunketts) at College Hill House, Father Joseph Plunkett erected a humble dwelling around 1750”.

Today, the house comes with 9.3 acres and includes a restored coach house with four bedroom suites for guests.

Fr Plunkett lived at College Hill House until his death in 1760, when the property reverted to his relative Lord Fingal.

But another priest, Fr Hanlon, retrieved the house for the Church when he earned the favour of Colonel Conyngham (ancestor of Lord Henry Mountcharles of Slane Castle).

When abroad in France, the priest managed to convince a French military tribunal not to shoot Conyngham, whom they had apprehended.

Hanlon was rewarded when the Conynghams bought back College Hill House for the Church and by the early 1800s, it had been upgraded to a parochial house.

The porch, with its marbled tiled floor, leads into a long high-ceiling hallway with original pitch-pine timber flooring, coving, architraves and central rose detailing.

The study and drawing room to the right and left have Georgian scale and features that were retained or otherwise restored, including a detailed marble chimney piece and dual aspect sash windows with panelled reveal surrounds.

The house has five bedrooms and five bathrooms.

At the end, the main hall widens under an archway, leading to a grand main staircase with more ornate detailing.

To the left is the family kitchen with hand-painted timber units, an oil-fired traditional Aga and access to a large dining room.

Also off the centre hall is the old sacristy, now repurposed as laundry room. This leads to the former church living room.

The hall also leads to a timber conservatory. “We added it to the back of the house so we could enjoy the views of the gardens,” O’Grady says.

The four-acre gardens are currently part of the Boyne Valley Garden Trail, attracting regular bus tours.

But with her children fully grown, O’Grady is downsizing to a bungalow. “The one thing I wanted was a porch the same as what we have at College Hill,” she says.

Sherry FitzGerald Country Homes and Sherry FitzGerald Davitt & Davitt seek €1.85m.