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| Thoor Ballylee |
(By Dr Charles Nelson - CC A-SA 2.0)
The 16th century Ballylee Castle
stands near the town of Gort in County Galway.
The castle originally belonged to the De Burgo (Burke) family before becoming
part of the estates of the Earls of Clanrickarde.
William Butler Yeats purchased the castle and
its adjoining cottage in 1917, He renamed the property Thoor Ballylee (“Thoor”
is Irish for tower.) Yeats and his family lived there during the summer for 12
years.
Ballylee was abandoned and fell into ruin in
the 1930s. However it was fully restored for the centenary of Yeats's birth in 1965
when it was reopened as a Yeats memorial and heritage centre.
Ballylee inspired Yeats to write “The Winding
Stair” and “The Tower” poem collections. On the first floor of the four-storey tower a
steep spiral staircase hewn from stone winds to the upper floors about which he
wrote,
"I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare
This winding, gyring, spring treadmill of a
stair is my ancestral stair.”
As part of his restoration Yeats had this short
verse carved on a slate and embedded into the tower wall.
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| Yeats's Verse |
(By James Yardley - CC BY-SA 2.0)
I, the poet William Yeats
With old mill boards and sea-green slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower for my wife George,
And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again.
Yeats believed in ghosts and thought that the
tower was haunted by an Anglo-Norman soldier.
A curator was reluctant to climb the winding
stair at the end of a day; she was convinced a spectral form wandered the worn
stairway. Her dog frequently appeared terrified of something in the downstairs
rooms.
In 1989 a photographer took some pictures in
Yeats’s sitting room. When his film was developed there was a ghostly
silhouette of what appeared to be a young man standing in front of the camera;
no one else had been in the room at the time the photo was taken. It has been
suggested that the ghostly boy may have been Yeats’s own son.
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| Thoor Ballylee |
(By James Yardley - CC BY-SA 2.0)
