Wicklow home of Michael Collins’ alleged lover for sale for €1.65m

Asking price: €1.65m

Agent: Finnegan Menton (01) 614 7900​​

The home of the glamorous republican activist and spy who made the controversial claim that she had an affair with Michael Collins is up for sale.

The three-storey Tudor-revival Killadreenan House at Newtownmountkennedy in Wicklow — once home to Moya Llewelyn Davies — is on offer for €1.65m.

Llewelyn Davies spent the last years of her life here before she died from cancer in September 1943.

The late 19th century property includes a main residence of approximately 5,600 sq ft, a converted coach house, a two-bedroom mews, stables and other outhouses.

It is on just under 18 acres of land that includes an ornamental lake with a viewing platform and summer house.

Blackrock-born Llewelyn Davies (nee O’Connor) was the daughter of an Irish MP who married an upper-crust British lawyer, although they proclaimed to have had an open relationship.

She returned to Ireland at the outbreak of the Easter Rising and worked actively for the republican movement, regularly supplying Collins with safe houses during the War of Independence.

She stirred controversy with her claims that she and Collins had an affair (dismissed by many historians), and through her private letters, which came up for auction in 2017.

Content included an allegation that Kitty Kiernan was a “heavy drinker, plain and vulgar”.

Though Llewelyn Davies is said to have spent the rest of her life mourning Collins after his assassination in 1923, she was no fainting caricature from a gothic novella, but an activist known for her energy, keen intelligence and attractive personality.

Highly literate, she was a progressive thinker and an atheist who believed, among other things, in sexual liberation within a marriage. She has also been at times described as a stalker, a spy and a fantasist by some who knew her and others who didn’t.

For better or for worse though, it is the Collins connection which brings her under the historical spotlight.

Whether or not the fluent Irish speaker actually had a physical relationship with The Big Fella, as she claimed, is still the subject of ongoing speculation, but it is generally agreed upon that Collins was very fond of Llewelyn Davies and the feeling was reciprocated.

Collins is said to have sent her flowers during her stint in Mountjoy Jail during the War of Independence, something that was noted by other female inmates.

Whether she did actually have an affair with Collins, we will probably never know. She insisted they did. Her son, Lord Richard Llewelyn Davies, maintained she was “the love of Collins’ life”, according to granddaughter Melissa, who says her father destroyed Llewelyn Davies’ memoirs in order to “protect her reputation and that of Collins”.

When she was just nine years old, Moya’s mother and her four sisters all died from a bout of food poisoning after eating contaminated mussels they collected at Seapoint, Co Dublin — a tragedy that resonated so much with Dubliners, it is mentioned in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Moya only ate a few of the mussels and became violently ill, but survived.

One version has it that she was sent from the dinner table by her mother for bad behaviour.

During the War of Independence, she and her husband Compton Llewelyn Davies gave refuge to rebels on the run, including Collins, at their city home at Furry Park in Killester in Dublin, and Moya moved weapons around the city for Collins.

They had moved back to Ireland having been radicalised by the executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising. Moya would assist Collins with his book The Path To Freedom.

Compton, who worked as a legal adviser to the British Post Office and also to future prime minister Lloyd George, was able to advise Collins on negotiation tactics with the British leader.

They had two children and seemed to enjoy a glamorous life in London where they were intimate with many establishment figures, including the likes of writer JM Barrie, who based Peter Pan and the Lost Boys on Compton’s nephews.

The design of Killadreenan House appears to be heavily influenced by the emerging arts and crafts Tudor-revival trend towards the end of the 19th century.

This is evidenced in the style of roof, which uses tiles and has a deep pitch, along with the Tudor-revival windows and mock-Tudor detail on the gables.

The two-storey over-basement property is built into a hill and has a moat around the lower floor, with steps up to the main front door.

The ground floor has an entrance hallway, reception hall and inner hallway, a drawing room, a dining room, kitchen/ breakfast room, study, an office, a shower room, toilet and one of the bedrooms.

The ‘garden level’ or basement has an inner hallway, family room, drying room, games room, kitchen, utility, wine cellar, storage and boot room.

On the first floor are four bedrooms and two bathrooms. Separately, the restored mews has a kitchen/dining room, living room and a utility on the ground floor, with two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs.

Much of the original period detail inside is intact, in particular a stairs and balustrade with timber panelling on the ground floor, typical of this building style.

There is a bow window in the main living room/drawing room with window seats.

In the basement, the wine cellar and drying room remain much as they would have been when Llewelyn Davies lived there.

There is also a large barn to the east of the house on the grounds which include a stream and a careworn tarmac tennis court.

At Killadreenan, Llewelyn Davies had begun the process of corresponding with historian PS O’Hegarty in order to “put the record straight” about the treaty negotiations and to ensure Collins was not treated unfairly by history.

If only we had her memoirs to put the story to bed once and for all.

Killadreenan House is for sale with an asking price of €1.65m through Finnegan Menton.