Augill House
Bed and Breakfast
W.B Yeats at Thoor Ballylee
Thoor Ballylee was Yeats's monument and symbol; in both aspects it had multiple significance. It satisified his desire for a rooted place in a known countryside, not far from Coole and his life-long friend Lady Gregory. The tower or castle that Yeats bought was a sixteeneth century norman castle built by the family de Burgo, or Burke. It consisted of four floors with one room on each, connected by a spiral stone stairway built into the seven-foot thickness of the massive outer wall. Each floor had a window overlooking the river which flowed alongside. At the top here was a flat roof reached by a final steep flight of steps from the floor below. Yeats had written his first impressions of Ballylee in an essay, 'Dust hath closed Helen's eye,' which was first printed in The Dome in October 1899. The tower had to be restored before Yeats could live in it. By the summer of 1919 Yeats and his wife and daughter had moved in. Yeats mentions Ballylee in a letter to Maud Gonne May 1918:
'We hope to be in Ballylee in a month and there I dream of making a house that may encourage people to avoid ugly manufactured things - an ideal poor man's house. Except a very few things imported as models we should get all made in Galway or Limerick. I am told that our neighbours are pleased that we are not getting 'grand things but old irish furniture'.
