Ballylee Castle,
County Galway
The poet W.B. Yeats was so enchanted with this 16th-century tower house beside the Cloon River that he purchased the property in 1916 and restored it. For twelve years Yeats made "Thoor Ballylee" his summer home which he found so "full of history and romance" that he was inspired to write "The Winding Stair" and "The Tower Poems". He once said: "To leave here is to leave beauty behind", and in a letter to Olivia Shakespeare wrote: "We are in our Tower and I am writing poetry as I always do here, and as always happens, no matter how I begin, it becomes love poetry before I am finished with it", and remarked "as you see I have no news, for nothing happens in this blessed place but a stray beggar or a heron."
The castle originally belonged to one of the Burke septs - it stands four storeys high and its original windows still survive in the upper part, though Yeats and his architect installed larger windows in the lower floors. The ground-floor chamber was described by Yeats as "the pleasantest room I have yet seen, a great wide window opening over the river and a round arched door leading to the thatched hall". He also loved the mural stair, symbolically declaring "This winding, gyring, spring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair; That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled there." Ballylee was abandoned and started to fall into ruin in the early 1930s. For the centenary of the poet's birth in 1965, however, the place was fully restored to appear as it was when he lived there. It now also houses an interpretative centre on his life and works. Lest it be forgotten that this was once the poet's home, there is a tablet on the wall commemorating his sojourn here: I, the poet William Yeats,
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