In County Galway, in the West of Ireland, there is a magical place of seven woods, lakes and limestone, rivers and turloughs. The great house at Coole Park is gone now, but in a walled garden still stands the Autograph Tree: a copper beech tree engraved with the initials of the leading lights of the Irish Literary Revival: William Butler Yeats, Edward Martyn, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Katherine Tynan, Violet Martin and Sean O’Casey, all personal friends of one Lady Augusta Gregory, whose home this once was.
Born in 1852 into the landed Anglo-Irish gentry, eventually married to a well-off, titled British widower 35 years her senior, Augusta Persse was brought up to lead the genteel life of an English noblewoman. But Ireland was to claim her as its own, beginning with her Irish nanny, Mary Sheridan, a Catholic and a native Irish speaker who introduced the young Augusta to the history, folklore, fairies and legends of the Irish countryside. Young Augusta was entranced.
In 1880, she married Sir William Henry Gregory, a well-travelled, well-educated man whose Irish estate house at Coole Park was filled with books and art, which the new Lady Gregory devoured. At their London home, she blossomed as a hostess at weekly salons attended by the leading artists and writers of the day.
She began to write while Sir William travelled, memoirs and poetry, most of it unpublished. But when her husband died in 1892, Lady Gregory went into mourning, returned alone to Coole Park, and began to write again, editing her late husband’s autobiography, which she published to critical acclaim 2 years later.
Then - a trip to the Aran Islands in 1893 re-awoke her interest in the Irish language and culture. She began to collect folktales from her Irish country neighbors, publishing them in several popular Irish folklore collections. And while visiting playwright Edward Martyn at his nearby castle, she met a young writer named William Butler Yeats, a meeting that would change her life, and Coole Park, forever. She would become Yeats’ lifelong friend & patron, and Martyn, Yeats and Lady Gregory would go on to found Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey. Coole Park became the ad hoc home and salon for the writers of the Irish Literary Revival, a place of inspiration for those artists and activists seeking to stir the embers of a Gaelic Ireland and who were deeply committed to Irish nationalism.
One of her own plays, Spreading The News, was performed on the Opening Night of the Abbey Theatre on a snowy December 27th in 1904, and her plays became a staple on the Abbey stage. As a playwright, she was known for pleasant comedies and folklore inspired tales, infused with a love of Irish language and history, that offered a gentler vison of Ireland than the darker, tragic dramas of Yeats and Synge. But her dedication and hard work on the Abbey’s Board of Directors, her skill at mediating the many disputes amongst it’s strong-willed creative founders, her adopting of the artists, actors and playwrights as if they were her own children, is perhaps her greatest legacy. The Abbey Theatre survived because Lady Augusta Gregory willed it to.
Lady Gregory lived to see her beloved Ireland achieve it’s independence, though Coole Park was damaged in the Irish Civil War. She sold her estate to the Irish government in 1927, to be preserved, with the agreement that she would live out her life there. Her only son, Robert, had already died in World War 1, as remembered in several of Yeats best-known poems. The woman Shaw once called the “greatest living Irishwoman” died in the spring of 1932, at her beloved Coole. The house’s contents were soon auctioned off, and the house left to deteriorate until it was demolished in 1941. Today, only the stables remain.
Today, the magical woods and the Autograph Tree are part of the 1000-acre Coole Park nature preserve, filled with ghosts and beauty. Yeats honored it, and Augusta, in his poem “Coole Park, 1929”:
Here traveler, scholar, poet, take your stand,
When all these rooms and passages are gone
When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound
And saplings root among the broken stone…
And dedicate
A moment's memory to that laurelled head.
- Coole Park, 1929, Yeats
For Celtic Cultural Alliance, this is Kate Scuffle. Slainte.
