Our ten-day motor tour of the south coast of Ireland last summer included two wonderful days in County Cork, the ancestral county of my mother’s family. Eleanor Toomey Forry’s father, Timothy Toomey, was born in Macroom, and her mother, Norah (Downing), came to America from Skibbereen. I had been in Cork just once before, fully 25 years ago, but it was only for a quick six-hour drive through Kerry and Cork, with a brief stop at Blarney Castle before returning to my hotel outside Limerick.

For this trip, we made arrangements through Ireland’s Blue Book (.irelands-blue-book.ie) to spend two days and nights just outside Mallow, and made day trips, including a drive to the coastal town of Kinsale.

We made our base at the Longueville House, a listed stately Georgian Country House just north of Mallow town, and about a 40-minute drive north from Cork city. The tour book describes the property this way:

“Longueville’s beautiful view of the Blackwater Valley belies a turbulent history. The oldest section of this house was built in 1720 by the Longfield family, who always maintained they were of French extraction and not Cromwellians. Current day proprietor William O’Callaghan is a descendant of original owner Donough O’Callaghan. Donough fought beside the Catholics after the collapse of the 1641 Rebellion and forfeited the land to Cromwell. At this time, when Richard Longfield was created Baron Longueville in 1795, the family changed the name of the estate to Longueville.

“Architecturally Longueville is typically late Georgian, of five bays and three storeys over a basement. The central doorway retains its original door and a large fanlight beneath a Doric portico. On the East side, you’ll find a fine Victorian conservatory of curved ironwork added in 1862, one of the last drawn up by Richard Turner, the greatest ironmaster and designer of glasshouses of the Victorian era. At the rear of the main house lies a large double courtyard, neo-classical in style, containing a number of fine two-storey buildings; some have been converted into living quarters. Inside, the house is embellished with ornate Italian-designed ceilings, a marble dining-room mantelpiece featuring a relief of Neptune in his chariot, rare, inlaid mahogany doors, and an unusual, full-height bifurcating staircase.

“Today, Longueville House is back in the hands of the O’Callaghan clan whose forebears were originally deprived of it by Cromwell in 1650. It was returned to the family in 1938, when the Longfields sold the property to Senator William O’Callaghan. Then, in 1969, Michael O’Callaghan (son of the senator) and his wife Jane opened Longueville’s doors to the public as a simple bed & breakfast.”

Eschewing any guidebooks and roadmaps, we used our IPhone Googlemap app to find our way to the northeast Cork town of Mallow. Driving through the town we soon found the entrance to the 500-acre estate. A two-minute drive through woods and up a winding private road led to the hill’s crest where we found the late Georgian building, which overlooks the green valley.

Once inside, we were met by Jane O’Callaghan, the family’s “queen bee,” a gracious and friendly woman who became our hostess in the main dining room and told us about the history of the estate during our stay. Herself a native of Limerick, Jane said she had married Michael in 1953 and moved there. “When I moved in here, my parent-in-laws were in here with my husband. They were living in one side of the house and we were living in the other side.”

Her then-new husband was a farmer, she said, and worked the property as a farm. “Even though it was a Georgian house, the decor was Victorian, everything was brown and yellow and green. Oh god! They loved the house and wanted to keep the house, so I said I’ll do a bed and breakfast- no business plan, nothing, just a very kind bank manager” to assist her in making the change.

The early days as a B&B saw her making a light breakfast for guests- tea, coffee, scones, full Irish breakfasts- and later, she says, she started high tea, but “high tea was a nightmare. So I decided to do a leg of lamb- whether they liked it or lumped it. That went fine for a week or two and then somebody said they didn’t like lamb, so then I said I’ll give you salmon.”

Just as the decade of the 1960s turned, Michael and Jane opened the doors to the public and Jane launched The Presidents’ Restaurant at Longueville in the early 1970s.

As the menu expanded, their reputation for excellent food and fine dining became widespread. Most of the produce they served was home grown. “My husband was a farmer, everything came fresh from the garden.” Eventually, she decided to take two weeks every November to go on “working vacations,” learning from chefs in London and Paris.

The management of the house has now passed to the third generation, and it is now operated by her chef son William and his wife Aisling.They met when they attended hotel management school at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) in the late 1980s.

“William went off to work in the UK and France,” she said, “and I go away for two weeks to take a cordon bleu course.” Over the decades, Jane has furnished the house with Irish wares acquired from around the country. “I bought decorations at auctions and antique shops,” she says. “Have you seen the basement? Just come down with me for a second.” She led us on a 15-minute tour that revealed an extensive wine cellar and room after room of function and storage space.

A good sign of the quality of the meals that comes out of the Longueville kitchen occurred on our second evening there, when we were joined at the adjacent table by a group of three Irish sisters who were enjoying a “girl’s night out.” They had come from their homes in different towns outside of Cork, they told us, just to treat themselves to the delicious gourmet food and exquisite décor of the Presidents’ Restaurant. It was something they do once or twice a year, they said.

We agreed with their judgment, and we certainly plan to visit with Jane and her family again the next time we’re in Cork.