In east County Cork, Ivan and Myrtle Allen bought a house built against a 15th-century castle in 1948 and ran it as a farm. In 1964 Myrtle opened a restaurant there that cooked what the farm and the neighbours produced; the house has since become a 32-room hotel.
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The estate covers about 300 acres: hens, pigs fed on beans and grain grown on the farm, sheep, and a two-acre orchard planted in 2014 for the house apple juice and cider. In 1983 Darina Allen and her brother Rory O’Connell opened the Ballymaloe Cookery School nearby, on a 100-acre certified organic farm.
The drawing rooms take meetings of up to 80; the Grainstore, a restored 17th-century farm building, holds 200 and has a hydraulic stage. A day at the cookery school fits easily into the programme. Trains from Cork stop at Midleton, 11 km away, and in season Brittany Ferries sails from Roscoff to Cork.
Photo credits : ReubenGrayPhoto (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0) ; Mike Searle (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0) ; Valerie Hinojosa (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
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