Coole Park Galway
Coole Park near Gort in County Galway was the country estate of Lady Augusta Gregory, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre and one of the central figures of the Irish Literary Revival, whose house was the gathering place for the greatest writers of early twentieth-century Ireland and whose influence on W B Yeats, John Millington Synge and the other writers she supported and encouraged was one of the most significant cultural patronage relationships in Irish literary history. The house itself was demolished in 1941, but the grounds and woodland of the estate are managed by Coillte and the Office of Public Works as a nature reserve and heritage site.
The most celebrated feature of Coole Park is the Autograph Tree, a large copper beech in the walled garden whose bark bears the carved initials of many of the writers and artists who visited Lady Gregory, including W B Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O'Casey, J M Synge, Douglas Hyde and others. The tree provides the most direct physical connection to the extraordinary circle of creative talent that gathered at Coole in the first decades of the twentieth century and makes an entirely unique piece of literary heritage.
Yeats wrote about Coole Park in several poems, most notably in Coole Park, 1929 and Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931, elegies for a place and a time that he knew were passing. The visitor centre provides an excellent introduction to the history of the estate and its cultural significance in the context of the Irish Literary Revival.