Thoor Ballylee
Unknown photographer
Thoor Ballylee
Yeats first saw the medieval "old square castle, Ballylee," three miles from Coole Park, when visiting Gregory in 1896. He purchased the property in 1917 for £35 after its sale by Robert Gregory to the Congested Districts Board. Following his marriage later that year to Georgie Hyde-Lees, he and his wife spent the next few years renovating the tower and its adjacent cottage, and the Yeats family summered there often between 1919 and 1927. Renamed "Thoor Ballylee" by Yeats, it became central to the iconography of his collections The Tower—in which he wrote that he had chosen the property "For an old neighbour's friendship. . .And decked and altered it for a girl's love"—and The Winding Stair.
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