Thoor Ballylee and W. B. Yeats

Thoor Ballylee and W. B. Yeats

In the heart of County Galway, nestled in the quiet countryside near Gort, stands Thoor Ballylee, a medieval Norman tower house that has become forever associated with the poet W. B. Yeats. Built in the 15th century by the de Burgo (Burke) family, the tower fell into ruin before Yeats purchased and restored it in 1917 as a family home and creative retreat. For Yeats, the tower was not only a place to live but a symbol of rootedness, Irish identity, and the imaginative past he sought to weave into his poetry.

Yeats renamed the tower "Thoor Ballylee" and spent many summers there with his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, and their children. He wrote of it fondly, calling it “the most important building in Ireland” because it represented the union of landscape, history, and art. The tower inspired some of his greatest works, including The Tower (1928), one of his most celebrated poetry collections. In its sturdy walls and winding staircase, Yeats found both solitude and inspiration, often linking the tower to themes of time, heritage, and the endurance of the spirit. The natural setting—the Streamstown River flowing past the weir, under the small stone bridge, and through green meadows—mirrored Yeats’s deep connection to the Irish landscape and to the mystical vision that infused his poetry.

So important was Thoor Ballylee to Yeats that he had words carved into its very stone, turning the building itself into a poem. Over the doorway, he placed the inscription:

This playful yet solemn verse memorialized both his love for Georgie and his devotion to the tower as a symbol of continuity and creation. The inscription remains to this day, a fusion of poetry and place, chiseled into the walls that protected him.

Yeats also made his home at Thoor Ballylee during one of Ireland’s most turbulent times: the Irish Civil War (1922–23). While violence spread across the countryside, the poet withdrew into the thick stone walls of his tower, listening to the river as he wrote. In Meditations in Time of Civil War, written here, he cast the tower as both a sanctuary and a watchtower, a place of meditation set against the chaos outside. “I declare this tower is my symbol,” he wrote, “I declare / This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair.”

Yet the surrounding violence darkened his reflections. Observing the savagery of conflict, he lamented:

“We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”

But still the presence of the Streamstown River and the enduring stones of Ballylee gave him hope for permanence:

“Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known.”

Thus, even as war shook the land, the tower and its river whispered to Yeats of endurance, of the quiet rhythms of nature that outlast human violence.

The countryside around the tower carries another artistic legacy of a very different kind. Just a few miles away, John Ford filmed his 1952 classic The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. One of the film’s most memorable sequences—where Wayne and O’Hara are seen running through the Streamstown River—was shot directly beside the tower itself. The sight of Hollywood’s stars splashing through the very waters Yeats once gazed upon creates a remarkable intersection of literature and cinema. The river that had carried Yeats’s meditations on civil strife became, in Ford’s hands, the setting for romance and reconciliation, linking two great visions of Ireland through the same flowing stream.

Thus, Thoor Ballylee stands at a unique crossroads of literature, history, and film. It is a place where Yeats carved his words into stone, confronted the storms of politics, and turned them into poetry, and where Ford captured the timeless charm of Ireland on screen. To visit Thoor Ballylee is to walk into Yeats’s world of stone and stream, to hear in the water and walls the echo of lines forged in a time of war, while also standing at the spot where John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara made cinematic history. Both remind us that in the flowing Streamstown and the enduring tower, Ireland’s cultural soul still whispers.