Will there be another 'Battle of Rochestown' for €1.5m well-set Woodview?

Irish Examiner

07-06-2025

THERE is deep Civil War history, sweeping harbour views and a hobby farm all wrapped up in Woodview, a one-off home in an enviable, sentinel position at the end of a cul de sac land and at the top of a wooded glen at Cork's Upper Rochestown.
Views from Woodview
It's changing of the guard time now after the best part of half a century at Woodview, the family home high on a hill for decades of the late Richard (Dick or Richie) O'Brien and his wife Elizabeth, where they reared a family of five and where the income from the cattle hobby farmer Richard kept put the couple's children through the costly college years.
Farm functions too...
'The builder told me I wouldn't last a night out here, it was so dark and isolated,' laughs city born (Ballinlough) Elizabeth all these happy years later, albeit admitting 'back then there wasn't a light at night it was pitch black.'
Outstanding in its fields
In the years since, house development has come all the way out from Douglas to Rochestown, while visible across the waters of Cork harbour now is Litle Island, Carrigrennan and homes inched along the hills east of Cork city from Glounthaune, while shipping plying a route to and from the city quay also hoves into view, day and night.
This is a quite fateful spot too in Irish Civil War terms as bitter battles (skirmish is too small a description) in the Battle of Rochestown of the Battle of Douglas took place in the woods here back in August 1922, with Free State troops landing an amphibian assault from Passage West to retake Cork city and other Munster anti-Treaty strongholds from Republican IRA forces.
It was one of three timed Bank Holiday landings to banish rebel Cork, the other were at Youghal and Union Hall: here, the pro-treaty forces prevailed, taking the high land above Douglas later Cork city, with dozens injured and as many as 17 killed between both sides: Elizabeth O'Brien recalls finding unspent cartridges on the lands now bordering Woodview.
Bullet-proof future location
The O'Briens family story is one of a love of land, and farming, as Richard (who died in 2019) grew up in Kilmurry/Lissarda, studied Agricultural Science in UCC in the early 1970s and ended up playing key roles in the milling sector among some of Cork's oldest milling families, including for owners of Protestant and Huguenot stock, eventually becoming MD of the 1930s-founded Southern Mills, now Southern Milling, the largest milling company in the south of Ireland.
While running mills was Dick O'Brien's day job, hobby and cattle farming was a passions and every day some or all of his three daughters and two sons raised here would be pressed into overalls, and into service, feeding and cleaning and farming at the O'Brien family homestead.
Bright lights
The home, substantial, two-storey and extended in the mid-1980s to its present 250 sq m size, was designed by architect Tony Dennehy and built by Forde & Meaney, is set at the end of the loveliest leafy farm lane between stone ditches alive with greenery. The private entrance is by a slatted shed and the family's nine acres of grazing also near the top of an old, grassy market road which runs from Upper Rochestown/Meadowlands down to the main Passage West road, the scene of Civil War hostilities back in the day, some of the bitterest fought outside of Dublin.
Since the O'Briens came to the area, Meadowlands has filled in with up to two dozen one-off detached homes (inc ten in a circle cluster built on serviced sites) along the cul de sac road which they still bookend with the O'Briens' proudly-titled 'hobby farm.
Kitchen by House of Coolmore
Making the decision to 'right-size,' but to stay relatively locally in Rochestown, Elizabeth O'Brien has given the sale of Woodview and its eight acres (greenbelt for now and on the high hill between Rochestown and Passage West) to auctioneer Anthony O'Regan of Keane Mahony Smith, who guides the immaculately kept 2,500 sq ft family home at €1.5m, saying next owners can do as little, or as much, with it as they wish.
Woodview is comfortable inside
Some of the neighbours are into horses, and future interest in Woodview is likely to come from some of that ilk, animals and space lovers, perhaps into horses, perhaps cattle or even rare breeds.
Rare breeds? When the Irish Examiner visited Woodview last weekend, visible to the east was the 35m high ferris wheel and its 24 spinning gondalas at Fota Wildlife Park, finishing its panoramic rounds above the 100 acre park and its zebras, ostriches and giraffes for now, on Sunday June 8.
VERDICT: Free Staters and ferris wheels? Whatever next for Woodview?