The house that vanished
On his return to Tory Island after a period away, one man discovered his home missing
A NEW radio series combining interviews with dramatised reconstructions will tell the remarkable and heartbreaking true story of the house that vanished on Ireland’s smallest inhabited island.
In the summer of 1994, filmmaker Neville Presho was approaching the shore of Tory Island off the coast of Co. Donegal when he was hit with the realisation that his house by the harbour had literally disappeared.
‘All I saw was six inches of plastic piping sticking out of the ground, which would have been my water supply,’ he recalls. ‘And there were large boulders surrounding my site, round the perimeter of where my house had been.
‘My bath was lying on the beach upside down.’
The site where his home once stood had been transformed into a car park for a newly-built hotel.
Mr Presho had travelled to Tory from New Zealand, where he’d emigrated six years earlier, to check up on the 150-year-old house and possibly spend the summer there with his family.
The Co. Down native bought the six-bedroom property in 1982 after falling in love with the island while shooting a documentary on the daily lives of locals, who had seemed to warm to him as much as he had to them.
But when the mystified filmmaker asked the locals what had happened to his house, his pleas were met with tight lips and evasive answers. Some said it had been lifted away by a storm ‘Wizard of Oz-style’. Others claimed it had burned to the ground.
‘It would be better if you didn’t ask questions about that,’ Mr Presho is told in the BBC radio documentary by the island’s king – a title with thousands of years’ heritage on Tory.
‘It could be the Tory motto,’ says the local priest. ‘You’ll not get one of them to speak out against the rest.’
The shock and exasperation of not being able to find out what had happened caused Mr Presho to have a breakdown back in New Zealand. He would end up losing his marriage and career, eventually finding himself back in Co. Down living with his elderly parents.
While returning to Tory for a visit in 2004, Mr Presho met the journalist Anton McCabe, who was surprised to hear the already-familiar story of the vanishing house recounted first hand. Mr McCabe helped Mr Presho get in touch with a solicitor, setting into motion the slow crawl for answers and justice.
Mr Presho had been anticipating some damage to the house when he returned in 1994. He had
‘My bath was on the beach, upside down’
received notification from Donegal County Council that it had been subjected to storm damage, but thought it couldn’t have been too severe owing to the dwelling’s thick walls.
Before that, he had been informed by his solicitor of an offer to buy the house. He refused the offer, in line with the lawyer’s advice on the value of the property.
The courts would eventually uncover that the new hotel that had sprung up next to Mr Presho’s site provided the key to unravelling the mystery. Unbeknownst to the homeowner, construction workers for the hotel had been staying in his house shortly before it mysteriously caught fire in January 1993. Over the next year, the house was gradually removed.
In a case that dragged out for years and saw multiple appeals, the hotel’s owner, Patrick Doohan, was ordered to pay Mr Presho a €46,000 evaluation of the house he lost.
‘You could build a really nice chicken coop with that sort of money,’ Mr Presho later said of the amount, ‘but you’d have no money left over to buy the chickens.’
‘You could build a chicken coop with that’