Coole Park’s Library and Facade

Coole Park’s Library and Facade

Vintage photographs. Provenance: Lady Gregory.

After the death of her husband, Lady Gregory used their Galway estate, Coole Park, to host all the key figures in the Irish Literary Revival, who inscribed their initials on a beech tree that still stands on its grounds. W. B. Yeats spent parts of nineteen summers working at Coole, and in his poem “Coole 1929,” he writes: "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."