A cottage on Bull Island is a rare thing. This one is selling for almost €1m with its own private beach

Asking price: €995,000

Agent: Earnest Estate Agents (01) 872 8808

​If you’re going to pay a million quid for a cottage, then it needs to be very special indeed.

So how about a former watchman’s cottage set right out into Dublin Bay with its own private beach and one of only seven homes ever permitted to be built on Captain William Bligh’s other ‘island’?

Dublin’s Bull Island, linked to mainland by a narrow spit, was the brainchild of the infamous Bligh of mutiny and Tahiti fame.

Although, Hollywood may have done a disservice to Bligh in the blockbuster Mutiny On The Bounty.

According to more sober historical sources, the 1789 mutiny against his command by Fletcher Christian had less to do with the bad treatment meted out to the seamen by their captain and more to do with the reluctance of the men to leave Tahiti, its beautiful women and the easy lifestyle the tropical island afforded them.

Bligh was apparently no more given to flogging than any other sea captain of the period.

Famously, the mutineers overthrew Bligh’s command and set him and his officers adrift in a small boat.

Miraculously, he survived and a couple of decades after his troubled East Indies breadfruit plant run, he found himself ashore in Dublin.

He was summoned to survey Dublin Bay for a map aimed at making the notoriously dangerous port safer for ships, many of which fell foul to bad weather while waiting for the high water necessary to get them past the bay’s notorious sandbanks.

Eventually, Bligh’s work led to the construction of Bull Wall at Clontarf, starting roughly 80m from the shore and extending out towards Poolbeg Lighthouse, to which a wooden bridge was added to allow public access to Dollymount Strand, which formed on the seaward side of Bull Island as a result of the new sea wall.

In common with Christian’s mutineers, it was the prospect of a laid-back island life, albeit close to the city centre, Dublin Airport and Croker, that attracted southsider Garry Murtagh to the charms of Bull Wall when one of its only seven dwellings came up for auction at the turn of the millennium.

“It was the location that really attracted me,” he says. “I always had 10-year tickets for Croke Park, so I went there a lot.

“After that, it was the access to the water out the back, you know. I had a dream that I’d be able to go on a jet ski around the place, you know, even to work at the time.”

The house was originally built to accommodate a watchman monitoring Dublin Bay for smuggling activity.

Murtagh’s home has direct access to the lagoon right behind it via a stair he constructed leading from the back garden of No6.

The property also shares its own private beach with the other residents and the sea scouts, who have a den next door.

It is an idyll only disturbed by the hundreds of daily visitors to Bull Wall itself, the Unesco Biospehere and Dollymount Strand, which is a magnet for kite surfers, dog walkers and, when the weather is good, bathers and sun-worshippers.

“It’s been fabulous,” he says. “Especially during the summer. Then once a year, they actually close the bridge for repairs for a few days and I would have to leave the car on the other side and walk over it.”

During the pandemic, the bridge was also closed to car traffic for a time, an experience which many northside Dubliners enjoyed.

Larger vehicles are not allowed on the bridge and any deliveries must access Bull Wall via the causeway up at Raheny and through the golf club grounds.

Murtagh renovated No6 to a high standard, opening out the space and modernising it.

“When I bought it, it was higgledy-piggledy, with toilets here and there and little rooms and all that,” he says.

“It was very old-fashioned. Nothing had been done to it for years. So I totally renovated and opened it all up.”

Today, albeit a cottage, the house isn’t small, with three bedrooms and three bathrooms.

These are located to the front of the house, which is all on one level. The master bedroom has a walk-in wardrobe lit with rooflights, which also light the en suite.

The bedroom looks out over the water, south towards the Poolbeg chimneys.

A second bedroom also has views out to the chimneys and the third is at the centre of the house, but is lit by rooflights and has an en suite bathroom. Further down the hall is a family bathroom.

The kitchen merges into an open-plan dining and living area with wall-to-wall glazing that spans the full length of the rear of the house.

There is a drawing room/‘snug’ accessible from both the dining area and the hallway. The kitchen has Neff appliances and a utility attached, and an additional Stanley heater/cooker.

The living and dining areas both have views out over the lagoon.

Number 6, and the cottage to which it is attached, are former watchmen’s cottages, while the two-storey houses adjacent to them are a former coastguard station dating from the 1940s, according to the National Built Heritage Service.

Number 6’s adjoining cottage has a basement, suggesting that Murtagh’s home may also have had one at one point.

Out the front is a garden which has become a hard surface and parking for four or five cars.

The back garden, meanwhile, is currently surfaced with artificial lawn and has a walkway down the centre to the ‘sea stairs’ at the back.

After a move to Portugal nearly 15 years ago, Murtagh has hung on to the cottage with the dream of coming back some day, but with his children Lucas and Sofia now in their late teens, having grown up on the Algarve, this has become an increasingly unlikely prospect.

“I was over and back all the time for years and my intentions were to go back there and retire.

“Yeah, you know the way you know you always like to return to where you were born. So no, that’s [Portugal] all they know, so the kids wouldn’t go. They have their friends and their life in Portugal now.”

But he’ll miss the many memories he created over the years.

“I had a jet ski and I loved that I’d fly up and down [the coast]. Yeah. I loved it.”

Earnest Estate Agents is seeking €995,000 for No6.