Strut your stuff at Leeside mansion
AS career changes go, it’s hard to imagine anything more dramatic than lighthouse keeper to taxidermist. But that was the fate of Frederick Raynor Rohu.
According to the Rohu family history, Frederick had been born in Inis Cú island in Co Donegal in 1846, and became a lighthouse keeper at the age of 19. The day job soon got in the way of his main interests though — natural history and ornithology — so he threw it over and set up as a taxidermist and furrier at Grand Parade in Cork. The Freeman’s Journal in 1883 described him as “not only a realistic stuffer of deceased birds and beasts but a humorist of the first water”.
Frederick lived with his wife Miriam and their eight children at Millboro House on the Lee Road outside the city, and doubtless he decorated it with grisly exhibits of glass-eyed stuffed animals.
Millboro (or Millbro on the early maps) has that sort of atmosphere. Built in 1768, it’s a well-preserved Georgian mansion with original features including woodpanelled walls, marble fireplaces and ornate plasterwork.
The house is on 13 acres on the banks of the River Lee, and stands at the end of a long driveway, so it can’t be seen from the road. The grounds include outhouses, an old gate lodge and a derelict two-storey house, and there’s a pond and orchard in the garden.
Millboro itself is a massive 6,800 sq ft in size, including a rear annexe, and has nine bedrooms — four on the first floor of the main house and five in the annexe.
By way of reception rooms there’s a drawing room and a dining room, both with mahogany-panelled walls and white marble fireplaces, together with a library with a beamed ceiling, and a square country kitchen with a range.
Millboro House is for sale at €1.1m with Marshs Auctioneers (021) 427 0347.