Tower · Gort

Thoor Ballylee, Yeats's Tower

Beside the Streamstown River outside Gort stands the tower Seamus Heaney called the most important public building in Ireland: Thoor Ballylee, Túr Bhaile Uí Laí, a fifteenth-century Burke tower house that W. B. Yeats bought and made his summer home. Four rooms, one above another, a winding stair in the thickness of the wall, a thatched cottage at its foot and the river under the windows.

Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.

Thoor Ballylee / Túr Bhaile Uí Laí This 16th-century tower house of the De Burgo (Burke) family was restored by William Butler Yeats as a retreat for himself an
Jerzy Strzelecki, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Thoor Ballylee, Coole Park on the 3D model; tap a pin for its page and directions.

A Burke tower on the Gregory estate

The tower was built in the fifteenth century by the de Burgos, the Burkes, as part of the vast estates of the Earls of Clanricarde. The four-arched bridge beside it dates from about 1825. In 1837 the Carrig family lived in it, and at Griffith's Valuation in 1857 Patrick Carrick was leasing a herd's house, castle and land at Ballylee from William Henry Gregory, valued at five pounds. By the early 1900s it belonged to the Gregorys of Coole, and Yeats, Lady Gregory's closest friend, bought it in 1916 or 1917.

The winding stair

Each of the four floors is a single room, joined by a spiral stone stair built into the seven-foot wall, with a window on every floor looking down on the river. Yeats called the ground-floor chamber the pleasantest room he had yet seen, with a great wide window over the river and a round arched door to the thatched hall, and he made the stair a symbol: This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair; That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled there. A tablet on the wall records his years here.

Floods and restoration

The river that makes the tower beautiful also floods it. In 2009 the building was badly damaged, and only in February 2012 did Fáilte Ireland begin repairs, urged on by the senator Lorraine Higgins, who argued that a reopened tower would bring visitors to east Galway. It reopened in June 2015 for the 150th anniversary of Yeats's birth, survived Storm Desmond that December, and has opened every summer since. Coole Park, where the revival began, is a few kilometres away.

Questions people ask

Where is Thoor Ballylee?

By the Streamstown River near Gort in south County Galway, a few kilometres from Coole Park.

When did Yeats live at Thoor Ballylee?

He bought the tower in 1916 or 1917 and used it as a summer home; a tablet on the wall records his time there.

Is Thoor Ballylee open?

It reopened in June 2015 after flood repairs and has opened every summer since.

How old is Thoor Ballylee?

It is a fifteenth-century Anglo-Norman tower house built by the de Burgos; the bridge beside it dates from about 1825.

Written from Wikipedia, "Thoor Ballylee" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.