My farmhouse nightmare

From the veranda of a small Irish farmhouse, I looked out over the sun-drenched West Cork peninsula. All I could hear was the clank of the boat yard below.

‘How much is the booking deposit on this one?’

After two days of viewing farms, I was tired of asking this question. Conveyancing is different in Ireland. As soon as you say you want to buy somewhere you have to transfer money to the estate agent to become ‘sale agreed’, and it’s often as much as 5 per cent.

I had found plenty of tantalising period farmhouses with 20, 30 or even 50 acres, but I couldn’t get too excited that they were ‘only’ £500,000, because that meant I had to come up with £25,000 to get under offer.

‘The booking deposit is fully refundable,’ the agents kept saying. But what good is that if you’re a normal person without a spare £25,000 hanging around in your bank account? Unless you sell your house, you don’t have any money to buy another house. It’s the English way.

I had driven from northern Cork all the way down to Skibbereen and beyond, stopping at farm after farm. It was a good job the car rental at Cork airport had given me a Toyota hybrid that was so fuel-efficient it was virtually impossible to get the needle to budge on the petrol gauge. After two days of driving up hills and down into valleys, I managed to go through less than a quarter of a tank and spent €20 filling it back up. How is that possible? I looked up the cost of buying one of these vehicles: £23,259.

It’s maddening, having to speculate to accumulate. People with money are the only people who are able to save money. If I had 20 grand to buy a Toyota Corolla I could save hundreds of pounds a month in petrol. If I had 20 grand to put down the booking deposit on an Irish farmhouse I would be able to buy a fantastically cheap lump of land and not stretch myself to the limit buying one acre in Kent, or 15 in Wales, where we would struggle for the rest of our lives to keep horses.

I don’t know what I’ve done with all the 20 grands I’ve ever had, now I think about it. I suppose they’re all trapped in this house on a village green in Surrey, which currently has a For Sale board outside it to no avail.

The first farm I looked at was the magical but wrecked one the builder boyfriend had already viewed. I pulled up at the iron gates ten minutes early, having driven straight from Cork airport. It was like something from a fairy tale. I peeped through the railings and it was an enchanted place. A long white Victorian house with yellow shutters at the windows in a courtyard with birds singing and the wind rustling the trees.

When after ten minutes the agent didn’t show, I squeezed around the side of the gate. The house was utterly derelict. Covered in vines, smashed to bits, rotting. The stable yard behind was even worse. There was nothing left in one piece. It was too much for me. After walking the overgrown fields with the agent and asking about the booking deposit, I got in the car and decided to drive.

I wound to the top of a hillside where a wind farm of turbines stood eerily on a ridge in the setting sun as a rainbow burst from the ground to the sky like fire.

An old man on the driveway of a small deserted bungalow waved and smiled as I went by. The moment was sweet enough and sad enough to make me want to cry.

I drove back down and checked into my Airbnb at a house in the village.

The next day, I drove south through a range of hills, stopping only to get out and pet a greyhound sitting in the middle of the road. Again, happy tears.

I ended up in a small village just short of Schull. It was as hot as the South of France.

I ate a piece of quiche from a café that was as good as anything I have ever tasted and sat on a bench outside in the sun. I watched as a camper van full of tourists smashed briefly into the side of a parked car, denting the wing. No one seemed to notice, or mind.

The place seemed frozen in time, oblivious to the sorts of problems I was running from.

By the time the pilot of the budget airline slammed the plane onto the runway so hard the passengers cheered, I was wondering whether I could buy a house by paying the deposit with three credit cards.