Our recent holiday with family in Ireland threw up the opportunity to visit two inter connected places in the Galway countryside associated with two of the country’s great cultural figures.
An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
The sound of the rain or sound
Of every wind that blows;
The stilted water-hen
Crossing Stream again
Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows.
W.B.Yeats ‘My House’ (1928)
Thoor Ballylee is a C14th Hiberno-Norman defensive tower on the gentle banks of the Streamstown river in the west of Ireland built by the De Burgos, or Burkes, a Norman clan whose power base was in this area. It had fallen into a state of decay when the poet W B Yeats first saw it in 1898 while staying with his friend and artistic collaborator Lady Augusta Gregory at neighbouring Coole Park.
Eventually, as a newly married man with two children wanting a home away from Dublin in the west from where his own family originated, Yeats bought the romantic though ruinous structure for £35 in 1916. Working closely with local craftsmen he and his wife George carefully restored the structure to make it habitable as their summer residence through the 1920’s.
Interesting to note that neither he nor fellow protestant notable Lady Gregory were directly threatened by either of the feuding sides during the rebellion against British rule or the bitter civil war that followed. As respected cultural icons they were otherwise shielded from the violence and atrocities that marked the ‘Troubles’ across Ireland.
It’s not hard to see why the tower became the Yeats’s happy place, acting as both a refuge and an inspiration. George decorated and furnished rooms in the arts and crafts style while also developing the skill of fishing from the windows! Friends visited regularly and everyone enjoyed the socialising. Yeats wrote some of his best poetry here; work that appears in the collections ‘The Tower’ (1928) and ‘The Winding Stair’ (1933).
Yeat’s deteriorating health, along with the damp and damage wrought by winter floods eventually caused the family to sell up and move away. Summers were increasingly spent abroad in France, with its kinder climate, better suited the ailing artist, but he never forgot this place or its importance in his life. Nor did admirers of his work forget him when in the summer of 2015, to mark the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s birth, the Yeats Thoor Bally Lee Society re-opened the tower to visitors and have continued to do so each season ever since. It is now a thriving cultural centre offering courses, talks and literary themed events.
We loved chatting with the cheerful knowledgeable warden and exploring all four floors of the tower. Intrigued by the stack of crow’s nest below one of the slit windows and surprised by the alarmed cries of a returning parent just as I caught sight of the fledglings within.
From the top, I took in extensive views over surrounding pastoral landscape rich in hedging, banks, woods and fields. The white flood of flowering hawthorn everywhere. Curiously the gentle sparkling stream below literally disappears within these woods. This distinctive Karst limestone country is known for its turloughs – intermittent lakes that fill with water from streams like this one that drain back into the water table, having no surface outlet.
Under my window ledge the waters race,/Otters below and moor-hens on the top,
Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven’s face,/Then darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop,/Run underground, rise in a rocky place/ In Coole demesne, and there to finish up/
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole./What’s water but the generated soul?’
( W.B. Yeats ‘Coole Park and Ballylee’, 1931)
We followed the hidden line of flow on leaving Yeats Tower and within a few miles were at Coole Park, now a national nature reserve stretching over 1,000 acres (400 Hectares). The woods here have been attracting visitors from when they were first developed by the Gregory family in the late C18th. Coole Park was home to Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) and in her widowhood her genius for inspiration made it a centre for the movers and shakers involved in the Irish Literary renaissance, from Synge to Shaw, Casey to Yeats.
“These woods have been well loved, well-tended by some who came before me, and my affection has been no less than theirs. The generations of trees have been my care, my comforters. Their companionship has often brought me peace.” ( Lady Gregory, 1931)
We were quickly enfolded into that peaceful, unhurried arboreal world and instantly appreciated the spell it must have cast on others. Although there was no time to discover the lakes with their swans or walk the woodland paths beyond the centre we did find the famous autograph tree – a venerable copper beech – where the great men of letters carved their initials during their frequent visits. Their incisions now stretched and compacted by growth and stoutly defended from further additions by the public by railings.
‘Here poet, traveller, scholar take your stand / when all these rooms and passages are gone’ (Yeats)
The Georgian house was demolished in 1941, although the handsome restored stable block has a museum, facilities and excellent tea rooms serving imaginative good quality food, so a most enjoyable lunch was had here.
Yeats had first arrived at Coole in 1897, physically and psychologically exhausted and was nursed back to health and a more sustainable lifestyle by Lady Gregory. As he described: “I found at last what I had been seeking always, a life of order and labour” Lady Gregory prescribed for him a balanced regimen of work and relaxation. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship that saw them in 1904 co-found with others the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In so doing they were preparing the ground for independence by writing, producing and performing plays about Irish life for Irish people.
More here: www.yeatsthoorballylee.org and https://www.coolepark.ie
STEPHEN TOMLIN 