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.

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.