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Coole Park is a nature reserve of approximately located a few miles west of Gort, County Galway, Ireland. It is operated by the Irish National Parks & Wildlife Service, part of the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. The park is in a low–lying karstic limestone area characterised by seasonal lakes, known as turloughs, which are almost unique to Ireland. It has extensive woodlands. There are 6 kilometres of signposted nature trails plus a formal late 18th century walled garden. ==History== The park was formerly the estate of the Gregory family. Coole House was built in the late 18th century for Robert Gregory. In 1880, Robert's great-grandson, William Henry Gregory married Isabella Augusta Persse, who became Lady Gregory. The walled garden contains an ''autograph tree'', a copper beech that is engraved with initials of many of the leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival who were personal friends of Lady Gregory including William Butler Yeats, Edward Martyn, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey. The Yeats poem ''The Wild Swans at Coole'' was inspired by the beauty of the swans in the turlough at Coole Park. Yeats's home at Thoor Ballylee was just 3 miles away; he also wrote "Coole Park, 1929", a poem that describes the park as a symbol for the revival of Irish literature: "Here traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand, / When all these rooms and passages are gone / When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound / And saplings root among the broken stone." Coole House may have been damaged in the Irish Civil War (1922–23). Lady Gregory sold the estate to the Irish state in 1927, but retained life tenancy. She died in 1932 and the furnishings were soon auctioned off. By the 1960s the state had allowed the Gregorys' former house to fall into a ruin, a neglect deplored by Micheál Mac Liammóir in 1964.〔(article in ) the Connacht Tribune, 5 September 1964.〕 Indeed, according to the National Archives, the building was actively demolished by the state in 1941.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Coole House )〕 Today, all that remains is the plinth on which it stood. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Coole Park」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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