Hikes and trails: WB Yeats wrote about this woodland loop — and it still has the wow factor
Lady Augusta Gregory’s Coole Park and its seven woodlands in Co Galway became the centre of the Literary Revival. Pictures: John G O'Dwyer
She was an unlikely nationalist. Born into the Protestant Ascendancy at Roxborough House, Co Galway, Isabella Persse was, like most of her landowning class, a staunch Unionist. Visiting the Aran Islands in 1893, after the death of her Loyalist husband Sir William Gregory of Coole Park, was a catalyst that profoundly changed her outlook. Exposed to the Irish language and culture, Lady Augusta Gregory, as she is better known, joined the newly founded Gaelic League, learned to speak Irish and began collecting stories and myths from the peasantry. Heavily influenced by her research into Irish history, her political views shifted towards nationalism and republicanism.
A chance meeting with WB Yeats at Tullira Castle, home of the playwright Edward Martyn, sparked a lifelong friendship that would be crucial to the early 20th-century Irish Literary Revival. Together, they co-founded the Abbey Theatre and co-wrote the play, Kathleen Ní Houlihan. In a drama that many saw as a call to arms, the Irish nation is personified as an old woman rejuvenated when a blood sacrifice is made on her behalf. Later, referring to this play, Yeats would write the famous lines, “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” The fact that Gregory’s stately home at Coole Park, Co Galway, became the centre of the Literary Revival was perhaps her biggest contribution to Ireland. Yeats, Shaw, Synge and O’ Casey came to stimulate their artistic imaginings among its tranquil waters and seven woodlands. Here, they, along with many other visiting writers and artists, carved their initials on the famous Autograph Tree, a copper beech standing sentinel in the walled garden.
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