estateCountry House Rescue · Season 4, Episode 3 · Aired July 5, 2012
Bantry House
Bantry, County Cork
This one survived. It remains in business.
On the show
Season 4, Episode 3 · July 5, 2012 · country house
UK show but this featured property is in the Republic of Ireland
What happened after
White-family stately home (owned since 1739) overlooking Bantry Bay; open to visitors with published 2026 season dates (30-31 Mar, 1 Apr-31 Oct, daily 10am-5pm, admission EUR14), B&B accommodation, and a scheduled West Cork Chamber Music Festival closing the house early on 30 Jun/1 Jul 2026.
What happened on the show
Bantry House sits above Bantry Bay in County Cork, an Irish house built around 1700 that the Shelswell-White family have held for more than three hundred years, the one property in this British series that lies across the water in the Republic of Ireland. Egerton and Brigitte Shelswell-White had spent over thirty years turning the semi-derelict house into both a family home and a working business. The pressure point was succession: their eldest daughter Sophie and her partner Josh had given up a life in Australia to come back and take on running the whole estate at Bantry. The house already earned a seasonal living from bed-and-breakfast rooms, a tea room and house tours, but it was not enough to sustain the place or the family. With feelings running high and barely any money to spend, Simon Davis had to lean on every ounce of negotiation to broker a solution between the generations and put the estate on firmer ground.
After the cameras left
Bantry House is open and running to a published calendar. As of our latest verification pass the White-family home overlooking Bantry Bay welcomes visitors across a defined 2026 season, broadly late March through the end of October, daily, with a modest admission charge, alongside bed-and-breakfast accommodation and the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, which closes the house early around the end of June. The current season and pricing detail reached us via a synthesis of the official site after a direct fetch hit a bandwidth limit, but the content is specific and current enough to hold at high confidence. So the succession Simon Davis helped negotiate appears to have taken: the next generation is carrying the seasonal visitor, accommodation and events business that keeps the Bantry estate alive.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.