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Home By The Sea:
Abandoned house once owned by Genesis - and large estate - on sale for £5M For some people, the Ross of Mull’s abandoned Pennyghael House will be haunting and creepy. For others, it’s part of rock and movie history. But for the right buyer, this eight bedroom wreck, alongside its 8,700 acre estate, presents an opportunity. Five million pounds is all it will cost, far more than its name implies. Pennyghael means the Pennyland of the Gael: a land valued by the penny or section of the penny. Now it will cost you half a billion pennies. The new buyer will be joining a long list of owners over the last 500 years including the English rock
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group Genesis, though their presence left a somewhat invisible touch. ‘The interest in the estate has been phenomenal,’ Paul Nicoll of Argyll land managers The Estates Office told Mull and Iona Life, ‘even though it has only just come to the market with several viewings already lined up and many more enquiries coming forward.’ For centuries, Pennyghael lay in the hands of the McGilvrays, from the first recorded Laird of Pennyghael, Archibald McIluray who died in 1565, to the last, Hugh McGilvray of Pennyghael, who sold the estate in 1801. A Canadian William MacGil-
livray of the North West Company, Montreal, then bought Pennyghael Estate and built its present house in 1819, but died before he could move in. In 1920, Pennyghael Estate was bought by the Pettigrews, who added the house’s two wings and then, when Mrs Pettigrew died, sold it to a Mr Harold Flower, in whose family it remained for the next two generations. The Buildings At Risk Register For Scotland noted Pennyghael House lay ‘largely unoccupied between 1957-1971’ and then in ‘erratic use’ before it was bought in 1986 by Genesis,
| AUTUMN 2021
Mull & Iona Life issue 43.indd 4
05/10/2021 15:25:26
