Coole Park

History

The park was formerly the estate of the Gregory family. Coole House was built in the late 18th century for Robert Gregory: a three-storey house with a square porch and as principal rooms a dining room and drawing-room with bay windows facing out to Coole Lough and the Burren Hills, and a library in between them.

In 1880, Robert's great-grandson, William Henry Gregory married Isabella Augusta Persse, who became Lady Gregory. The death in World War I of their only child, Robert, a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, inspired the poet W B Yeats to write works which included "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death."

The walled garden contains an autograph tree, a mature copper beech that is engraved with initials of many of the leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival who were personal friends of Lady Gregory including Yeats, Edward Martyn, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Mario Manlio Rossi and Seán O'Casey. Yeats' poem The Wild Swans at Coole was inspired by the beauty of the swans in the turlough at Coole Park. Yeats's home at Thoor Ballylee was just 3 miles away; he also wrote "Coole Park, 1929", a poem that describes the park as a symbol for the revival of Irish literature:

"Here traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand, / When all these rooms and passages are gone / When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound / And saplings root among the broken stone."

Coole House was sold by Margaret Gregory, the widowed wife of Robert Gregory, to the Irish state in 1927, with life tenancy for her mother-in-law. Lady Gregory died in 1932 and the furnishings were soon auctioned off. According to the National Archives, the building fell into a ruin, a neglect deplored by Micheál Mac Liammóir in 1964, and was demolished by the state in 1941. Today, all that remains is the plinth on which it stood.