Coole Park, Nature reserve and historic park in County Galway, Ireland.
Coole Park is a nature reserve of about 1,000 acres west of Gort, County Galway, in a low-lying karstic limestone area with turloughs, seasonal lakes almost unique to Ireland. It has 6 kilometres of signposted nature trails, woodlands, and a formal late 18th-century walled garden. The former Coole House is gone; only the plinth on which it stood remains.
The estate belonged to Lady Augusta Gregory in the early 1900s, when she made it a gathering place for writers of the Irish Literary Revival. The location became important because of the creative minds who visited and worked within its grounds.
The copper beech tree in the walled garden displays carved initials of writers such as William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw who visited this place. These marks show how literary figures made this location part of their own story.
The grounds are open all year round with free admission, and 6 kilometres of signposted nature trails cross the park. The visitor centre in the late 18th-century outbuildings opens only in high season, April to September inclusive, and holds the tea rooms and an audio-visual presentation on Lady Gregory.
The walled garden holds a copper beech known as the Autograph Tree, its bark carved since summer 1898 with the initials of Irish writers and friends of Lady Gregory, among them W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Seán O'Casey and Douglas Hyde, later the first President of Ireland.
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