Coole Park Overview

Two of Yeats’s favorite retreats lie about 31km south of Galway near Gort, where N18 meets N66. Coole Park is now a museum and a national park. Thoor Ballylee, Yeats’s beloved home, has been restored so it appears as it did when Yeats lived there. The sites are best accessed by car, but biking is another option. Be warned: high winds can make biking the 14km from Kinvara a painful struggle.

The 400-hectare Coole Park nature reserve was once the estate of Lady Augusta Gregory, the playwright and folklorist who, along with Yeats, co-founded the Abbey Theater in Dublin (see The Revival). Although the house was ruined in the 1922 Civil War, the yew walk and garden have survived. In the garden area, a great copper beech known as the “autograph tree” bears the initials of several historical figures, including George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, Douglas Hyde (the first president of Ireland), and Yeats himself. Entrance to the park is free. The Coole Park Visitors Centre houses a walk-through exhibit based on the memoirs of Lady Augusta’s granddaughter. The exhibition displays the Coole Park Estate and the members of the Irish Literary Revival who were frequent guests with stage-sets, video footage, and audio recordings from the book. A 30min. video “Lady Gregory of Coole: A Literary History” is also available. The best guide to Coole Park is The 7 Woods Trail and Family Trail (€1.50), which outlines the two main trailways in the park and is available at the Visitors Centre. (☎631 804; www.coolepark.ie. Open daily June-Aug. 10am-6pm; Apr.-May, and Sept. daily 10am-5pm. Last admission 1hr. before closing for the audio program, 15min. for the center. €3, students €1.30.) One kilometer from the garden, Coole Lake is where Yeats watched “nine-and-fifty swans..all suddenly mount/And scatter wheeling in great broken rings/Upon their clamorous wings.” All three species of swan found in Ireland—Whooper, Bewick’s, and mute swans—still gather here in winter; in summer, they are replaced by cows lumbering down to the beach. Five kilometers north of Coole Park, an 800m-long stretch of road runs from the Galway road to Thoor Ballylee, a tower built in the 16th century. In 1916, Yeats bought it for £35 and renovated it with his wife. He and his family lived here off and on from 1922 to 1928. While he was cloistered here writing his “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” Republican forces blew up the bridge next to the tower. According to Yeats, they “forbade us to leave the house, but were otherwise polite, even saying at last ‘Good-night, thank you.’” The Visitors Centre offers a tour of the furnished Tower House and a 17min. film on Yeats’s life at Thoor Ballylee. The gift shop has an extensive book selection. (☎631 436. Open June-Sept. M-Sa 9:30am-5pm. €6, students €5.50.)

The Kilartan Gregory Museum greets visitors in a stone house on the road from Kinvara at the turnoff to N18. The building was once the school where Lady Augusta Gregory started one of the first branches of the Gaelic League. It now houses a charming reproduction of a traditional Irish schoolroom, complete with actual posters and books from the turn of the century. (☎632 346 or 631 069. Open June-Aug. daily 10am-5pm; Sept. and May Su 1-5pm. Oct.-Apr. by appointment only. €2.60,families €7.) For a delicious meal in a bright cafe and art space, visit The Gallery Café , Market Sq. Gort, in the lime green building across from the town car park. At €4.40, the gallery salad, served with thick slices of homemade herb bread, is a steal. (☎091 630 630. Pizza €8.50-10.50; Vegetarian and meat plates €5-11. Open daily 11am-11p m.)