Our home has its own sunrise ‘solstice catcher’

Someone long ago created a special feature in our old house to catch the rising sun on the winter solstice

As soon as we saw it, we fell in love with the quaint old farmhouse on a gently-sloping hillside overlooking Bantry Bay in the south-west of Ireland.

My wife Angie is Irish and we’d been planning to move home from the UK to Ireland for some time. We made an offer for the house, which was accepted, and we moved in during the early spring of 2011.

We loved the quirky corners and contours of our new home on the Beara peninsula: the red-tiled roof, the rugged stone walls, the exposed beams, the big wood-burning stove, the gardens with conifers and cabbage palms, and the way the house — 200 years old to its foundations — faces south-east to welcome the day.

A curiosity we encountered right away was a recess, about 15 inches wide and 20 inches tall, set into a wall of the living room. The original walls of the house are two and half feet thick, and the little cupboard went halfway in, and was fitted with a glass-panelled wooden door. We were wondering what its purpose was when the local man who sold us the house called to see how we were settling in and if there was anything we needed.