West Cork Eccles Hotel comes to market for €5 million

The Victorian-style hotel has almost 200 years of history in one of Ireland’s best-loved beauty spots; it was , originally built as the Glengarriff Hotel by Lord Bantry and leased to Thomas Eccles in 1835, placed on the site of an even older hostelry, dating to the 1740s.

The historic family’s surname Eccles has stayed over the door of the hotel with ornate cast iron veranda through several subsequent ownerships and upgrades after eventually being sold by the Eccles family in the mid-1900s.

Owners have included an Italian businessman Renato Fogliana in the 1970s, local O’Keeffe and Murphy families, the Hanratty family form Dublin who owned and sold on a Howth hotel around 2000 for development, investing a reported €8m in purchase and upgrades at the Eccles, then with 66 bedrooms, and later, hoteliers Ray Byrne and Eoin Doyle since c 2019.

It’s on the market with agents CBRE and hospitality expert John Hughes, with a €5 million price guide.

Facing Bantry Bay and Garinish Island, the Eccles now has a spa, 59 bedrooms and suites, function room, bar, terrace, restaurant and other amenities, all situated on the N71 between Bantry and Kenmare, by the Beara peninsula, Caha mountains and along one of the most beautiful stretches of the Wild Atlantic Way.

Among the well-known guests down the centuries and decades have been writers William Makepeace Thackeray, George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats, as well as Pippa Midleton in 2019.

John Hughes Director CBRE Hotels said  “the sale of the Eccles Hotel offers a superb opportunity to acquire one of Irelands oldest hotels located in popular West Cork and is ideally located on the increasingly popular Wild Atlantic Way tourist route. The hotel has been sympathetically refurbished to create a hotel of character and offers a purchaser the ability to further grow this long established business.”