Coole Park

The Gregorys and the revival

Coole House was built in the late eighteenth century for Robert Gregory: three storeys, a square porch, a dining room and drawing room with bay windows looking to Coole Lough and the Burren hills, and a library between them. In 1880 his great-grandson William Henry Gregory married Isabella Augusta Persse, and as Lady Gregory she made the house the meeting place of the revival. Their only child, Robert, a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, was killed in the First World War, and Yeats wrote An Irish Airman Foresees His Death for him.

In the walled garden a mature copper beech, the autograph tree, is carved with the initials of Lady Gregory's friends: Yeats, Edward Martyn, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Mario Manlio Rossi, Seán O'Casey. The lake inspired The Wild Swans at Coole.

Turloughs, woods and swans

The park lies on low karst limestone, where lakes appear in winter and vanish in summer: turloughs, almost unique to Ireland and a priority habitat under the EU Habitats Directive. Coole Lough and Garryland Wood have been a Ramsar wetland of international importance since 1990, the park is part of the Coole-Garryland candidate Special Area of Conservation, and 520 hectares are a Special Protection Area, designated in 1996, for wintering waterfowl, above all whooper swans. It is a wildfowl sanctuary under the Wildlife Act, with no shooting. In 2014 fungal disease forced the felling of many trees.

Visiting

The grounds are open all year with free admission and six kilometres of signposted trails. The visitor centre in the old outbuildings opens from April to September with tea rooms, an audio-visual show on Lady Gregory and the literary history of the place, and an exhibition seen through the eyes of her granddaughters, Me and Nu. Thoor Ballylee, Yeats's tower, is a few kilometres away; the model on this page pins both, and Kilmacduagh beyond.