Cool Parts of Coole Park

After several days of 'slothing' around my apartment and having a few seemingly well-thought out plans fall through, today I ventured off to Coole Park and the former estate of Lady Augusta Gregory, friend and muse of one William Butler Yeats. I've studied Yeats extensively this year, mostly through my 20th Century Literature Class (that feels like a century ago), but also a little bit through my own readings and museum findings. His brother, Jack Yeats, was a prolific painter who boats a huge exhibition at the local (and free) Galway Museum. Anyway, all semester I've been trying to get to Thoor Ballylee, Yeat's monument and tower located in the middle of County Galway, which you would think is an easy enough commute, but not so.

Public transportation in Ireland is great: CityLink or GoBus will get you to any of the big cities and a lot of the tourist destinations for a pretty good price, and BusEireann or a few smaller services are very effective for bouncing around to more places off the beaten trail. I've used the train once, as well. But for all of these wonderful options, there are a lot of places that are only accessible by car, limousine or horse and buggy. On Monday we scrapped plans to visit Clonmacnoise (but will go tomorrow!) because we'd have had to take an expensive taxi, and yesterday I needed to skip a livingsocial cruise deal around the littlest Aran Island and under the Cliffs of Moher because there was legitimately no way to leave the port town after 1:45 in the afternoon without your own magical transport. Thestrals are out, flumes are underappreciated, and I've still got a ways to go in my teleportation skills. So Thoor Ballylee is no exception of a hard-to-get-to but worthwhile place, 5km walking distance from a town called Gort.

I didn't reach it today, although I found out at the very end of the excursion that there had been a sign for the tower near where we'd been traipsing around all day, which was a bit heartbreaking, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I absolutely can't make it back out there sometime next week. At 10 euro for a return student ticket, Gort is very nicely accessible from Galway and easily doable in a day. Coole Park itself was a 3km walk- a little bit under 2 miles, and when we set out that morning the weather was looking extremely temperamental  It's always a gamble trying to do anything in Ireland outdoors, which is frustrating at times because it's a very outdoors-y sort of place, but today we definitely lucked out. It drizzled all during the bus ride out, was mostly sunny through our walk to and around the estate, and poured while we were sitting under a covered waiting area to get on the bus back to Galway.

The place itself was really a gem, something we'd stumbled upon as a plan at 2 am the night before despite always having been vaugely in the back of my mind as a maybe destination at some point in the semester. (The problem is, 'sometime' is quickly becoming a very narrow window). Filled with beautiful green trees and boulders and wildflowers, all of the recent rain had done wonders for the natural spring feel, smell and look of the gardens. In the walled garden, we found a few pretty gazebos and an enormous old tree that had been 'autographed' by many of Lady Gregory's now famous friends. She asked them to carve their initials into the bark, almost all of which are still visible and easily identifiable. I'm not the biggest Yeats fan for all of my obsession with reaching his tower, but it was still pretty cool to see the letters he etched away right distinctly there in front of me. Throughout the park, there were little placards indicating what portion of the trail we were on, how they inspired various poems of Yeats, and excerpts from respective writing about those locations.

In general, it was just a very good day trip, one of those spontaneous ones that work out really well. It was a lot of walking and my feet are blistered yet again, but I really enjoyed it. I kept exclaiming at how 'cool' everything was and then pretending that I'd just made some very witty never-before-heard pun. Likely not, but it was effective and fitting. We lunched on a 'cool' old stone bench in the shade of a gigantic-branched tree that fairies definitely live under (it was surrounded by a ring of similarly gargantuan trunks), happened upon a winding river and lots of mossy groves, as well as an odd-looking statue bust wearing a cardigan tied around his shoulders. The visitor's center was free, and included recreated rooms from the old Coole house, based off of a memoir written by Lady Gregory's grandchildren and their time wandering and exploring the grounds like only little girls can do. It included artifacts from the family as well as famous visitors (Yeats included) and was staffed by two very friendly women. School groups were there the same day as us, which is always a funny concept to think about- Irish kids going on field trips to all of these places I've been attempting to reach over a semester.

It was a very cool day, and one I'm glad to have experienced! Hopefully, the weather and buses will hold up a bit more reliably during my now last week here. Keep checking back, we're in the final stretch now.