Nothing lacking in Lacken House

Cavan: €1m Think treasure and Easter-egg hunts, fishing, canoeing, bonfires, parties, gardening, swimming, tree climing, and just plain relaxing and you have the essence of Lacken House, say the owners who are reluctantly selling up after 12 years.

The postcard-pretty house near the village of Ballinagh in Co Cavan sits in a valley surrounded by 2.8 acres of grounds with the Erne river running by.

For sale by private treaty through Douglas Newman Good at €1 million, the Georgian house will appeal to city folk thinking about selling up and getting away from it all.

The seven-bedroom house has been run as a guest house but it could also be developed as a holiday home business with five outbuildings to be developed, including two mill buildings.

Located 13km from Cavan town, Lacken has a magical location deep in the countryside. The entrance road rolls gently down through the front gardens past a stream and pond, past lawns with seats under the cherry trees to the stone two-storey house.

Built on a generous scale, the house has 371sq m (4,000sq ft) of living space with four reception rooms on the ground floor along with a large country-style kitchen.

There are plenty of original features, including fireplaces, polished timber floors and the original flagstone floor of the old kitchen, now a den or sittingroom.

Upstairs, five of the seven bedrooms have en suites and all are spacious light rooms looking out over the garden.

The outbuildings include a two-storey coach house and a large mill building, as well as the ruins of two further mills. These were once powered off the River Erne by means of a weir on a bend in the river.

From this weir a mill race was cut out of the stone banks of the river through woodlands and directed towards the mills. Behind the corn mill the mill race was divided, creating another flowing on towards the flax mill.

The mills worked up until the 1950s with people bringing grain from far and wide to be dried in the kiln and milled.

The gardens and woodlands are crossed with the river, mill races and streams. Hundreds of birds sing from the trees on the river bank, providing a dawn chorus second to none, say the owners, while trout, roach, pike and perch abound in the river and can be caught for dinner.