Thoor Ballylee: Yeats' Tower

Yeats bought a derelict 15th-century Anglo-Norman tower house in Galway for £35, restored it in 1919, called it Thoor Ballylee and lived in it until 1929. He then wrote his way out of it: The Tower came out of these walls, and the tower and its winding stair run through the poems that followed, including The Winding Stair of 1933, by which time the family had left. He set his own inscription into the stone outside. Three miles away is Coole Park, Lady Gregory's estate and the seedbed of the Irish Literary Revival, where the house is gone but the Autograph Tree still carries the initials Yeats, Shaw and Synge cut into it.