Ballynatray estate sale to set €35m Munster property price record

Henry Gwyn-Jones had paid over €11m for Ballynatray on 400 acres 20 years ago, describing it as “love at first sight,” and since then has done a second series of renovations as well as more than doubling the estate’s land bank to 850 acres, with up to three miles of frontage on the River Blackwater, historically one of Europe’s great salmon rivers.

If — as has been suggested — James Dyson or his investment companies emerge as the purchaser, Ballynatray’s new owner may be able to visit the remarkable riverside estate by air or by sea: Dyson owns several private jets, a 15-seat helicopter, and a 91m private super yacht, Nahlin, built in Scotland in 1930.

Ballynatray has been used as a shooting estate for driven and clay shoots and as a bijou wedding and function venue. It has also been a private Irish home to London-based Henry Gwyn-Jones, whose family comes from the Lough Cutra Estate in Gort, Co Galway (previously visited in 2014 by Britain’s now-monarch, King Charles and Camilla) and who has extensive international property interests, primarily in Britain and Eastern Europe.

The Ballynatray estate, with the riverside sixth century Molana Abbey on its boundary and courtyard cottages, set a Munster price record back in 2004 when it was sold to Gwyn-Jones by a European industrialist family the Boissevains, who’d bought it in a raw state in 1997 for €1.5m from its historic owners, the Ponsonby family, and who added a security ‘panic room’ to the 230-year-old house, as well as adding a basement swimming pool and other 21st century features.

It’s now set to forge a new price threshold once more, having met or surpassed its €30m+ guide in the private sale which is now proceeding.

The very advanced transaction of the world-class property is subject to numerous non-disclosure agreements and no parties to the sale have commented, or returned queries from the ‘Irish Examiner’ as to the purchaser’s identity, background, and purpose.

Attempts this week to get a comment from James Dyson and his foundation also went unanswered.

However, sources have linked the inventor and entrepreneur with the purchase: He’s among Britain’s five richest individuals, worth c€25bn according to various wealth tables.

The multi-billionaire Dyson is a household name, thanks to his various domestic and household inventions from vacuum cleaners to washing machines, to hand driers, boats, and wheelbarrows, as well as his various interventions in British politics, most recently as a pro-Brexit campaigner and thorn in the side of various British prime ministers.

As recently as last week, Dyson attacked British PM’s Rishi Sunak’s tax policies as “shortsighted” and “stupid”, leaving the country in a state of “covid inertia”, adding that “growth has become a dirty word”.

“In the global economy, companies will simply choose to transfer jobs and invest elsewhere. Our country has an illustrious history of enterprise and innovation, born of a culture which we are in the process of extinguishing. We have got through the worst of Covid, but risk wasting the recovery,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph.

Dyson, aged 76, and his wife, artist and designer Deirdre Dyson (nee Hindmarsh) with whom he has three adult children, currently owns a 300-acre Georgian estate, Dodington Park in Gloucestershire since the early 2000s.

The couple had previously bought an estate and winery in France 25 years ago and have a London home in Chelsea. 

Recently, Dyson bought and resold a 21,000sq ft ‘triplex’ apartment in Singapore having temporarily changed his place of residence, and maintains another residence there as well as manufacturing interests in Asia.

Away from his main business interests, over the years Dyson has invested heavily in agricultural land in Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire, and Oxfordshire, and his Singapore-based Weybourne Holdings Pte is reported as controlling about 30 British properties, many of them commercial investments, worth c€300m.

Is he now about to hoover up one of this country’s finest and largest riverside estates, on the Irish Rhine?