Thoor Ballylee

Thoor Ballylee was raised in the fifteenth century by the septs de Burgo, or Burke, as a fortified Anglo-Norman tower house on the Streamstown River near Gort in County Galway, and it formed part of the huge estates of the Earls of Clanricarde of that same de Burgo family. Four floors carry one room apiece, linked by a spiral stone stair built into the seven-foot thickness of the outer wall, each floor with a window over the water. A small thatched cottage adjoins the tower, and the four-arched bridge nearby dates to around 1825.

The Carrig family was recorded living in the castle in 1837. Griffith's Valuation of 1857 lists Patrick Carrick leasing a herd's house, castle and land at Ballylee, in the barony of Kiltartan, from William Henry Gregory, the property then valued at £5. The Gregorys still owned the tower in the early 1900s, by which time it lay within the Coole estate of Lady Augusta Gregory. Coole House was the meeting place of the Irish literary group, drawing in a great number of the preeminent figures of the day, and the Irish Literary Revival began in Coole Park, close by the tower.

W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory's lifelong friend, bought the property in 1916 or 1917 for the nominal sum of £35, enchanted by it and by its rural setting. Having an affinity for the Irish language, he dropped the word "castle" and put in its place Thoor, from túr, the Irish for tower. With his architect William A. Scott he spent the following two years restoring it, fitting larger windows to the lower floors while the upper part of the tower kept its original ones.

From 1921 to 1929 Yeats and his family lived there, using it as a country retreat and summer home and valuing it as monument and symbol of the rooted place in the countryside he wanted. He called the ground-floor chamber "the pleasantest room I have yet seen, a great wide window opening over the river and a round arched door leading to the thatched hall", and wrote to a friend that "everything is so beautiful that to go elsewhere is to leave beauty behind". The mural stair he claimed outright — "This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair" — and the place gave him the poems The Tower and Coole Park and Ballylee.

The Yeats family moved out in 1929 and Ballylee fell to disuse and ruin. In 1951 John Ford shot the river crossing of The Quiet Man, with John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, next to the tower.

Mary Hanley (1914–1979), a native of Carron in County Clare, founded the Kiltartan Society in 1961 to foster interest in the literary history of the district, and of Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and Yeats in particular. She was responsible for the restoration of Thoor Ballylee, with the aid of Bord Fáilte and the Yeats family; the Office of Public Works owned the property at the time. Hanley persuaded the poet Padraic Colum to open the castle on Sunday 20 June 1965, the centenary of Yeats's birth, refitted as it had been when he lived there and serving as a Yeats museum of first editions and furniture. The adjoining miller's cottage became a tea room and shop, later expanded by a new building at the back.

Its closeness to the Streamstown River leaves Thoor Ballylee subject to sporadic flooding, and in 2009 the tower was extensively damaged by floodwater. Work by Fáilte Ireland to restore it began only in February 2012; among those pressing for the repairs was the East Galway senator Lorraine Higgins, who argued that a reopened Yeats's Tower would be a boon to local tourism. It reopened in June 2015 for the 150th anniversary of Yeats's birth, and despite damage from Storm Desmond that December it has opened every summer since. Seamus Heaney described it as "the most important public building in Ireland".