A CACHE of 130 year old Havana cigars found in Temple House, Co Sligo, may be sold to an American collector for £1 million.

The cigars - 500 of them in a sealed box - are part of a huge consignment that arrived in Ballymote from Havana in the early 1860s. They are believed to have been made from an entire tobacco crop of one estate in Cuba.

The cigars aye still in excellent smoking condition, according to Sandy Perceval, who owns and runs Temple House.

The reason for their extraordinary longevity is the condition in which they were stored a cellar close to a lake. "The west of Ireland is an ideal humidor," he says. He has kept several dozen cigars for his own pleasure. However, the sale of the remaining cigars will mean much needed money to carry out restoration work on Temple House.

The Perceval family has lived at Temple House continuously since 1665, save for three years in the last century. And it was this short hiatus that resulted in the arrival there of the cigars.

The estate was sold in the mid 19th century, but the new English landlord proved so unpopular with the tenants that many of them appealed to Alexander Perceval, a younger son who had moved to Hong Kong to work for Jardine Matheson. He agreed to buy back the estate and, at the same time, he married the niece of one the founders of Jardine Mathieson, Annie de Blois. They set sail for Boston, where the wedding was to take place, stopping off in Havana to stock up on cigars.

They returned to Ireland, where they had a hero's welcome from the villagers. According to local lore, it took a full week to transport the crates of cigars from the station to the house. Alexander Perceval set about restoring the house and the estate but he died three years later.

The cigars, which he had bought as an investment, languished in the attic of Temple House. Sandy Perceval remembers once having to burn sackloads of them, because they had gone dry. More recently, he discovered a Swiss au pair using bundles of them as kindling.

One hundred of them are now lodged at Montes, an exclusive dining and cigar club on Sloane Street in London.

The remaining box of 500 is in storage abroad. An American collector has offered $1 million for it, or $2,000 per cigar.

The estimated smoking time of the four inch cigars is between 30 and 40 minutes, which means that anyone rich enough to buy them; will pay around a dollar a second for the pleasure of smoking them.