The Autograph Tree is located in Coole Park near Gort, County Galway in Ireland. We visited in 1991.
The following information is from the Coole Park website.Coole House was more than just a Georgian era country home to Lady Augusta Gregory. After the death of her beloved husband, one Augusta mourned for the rest of her life, the estate became the center for the Irish Literary Revival in the early 20th century. The estate saw visits from many of Ireland's preeminent writers and artists of the time, such as Sean O'Casey, John Millington Synge, first President of Ireland Douglas Hyde and WB Yeats, who were all members of this revival. It was Yeats who eventually bought Ballylee Castle to use as a summer retreat. And it was with Yeats that Augusta founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1903, along with JM Synge. However, it was Yeats who drew most from Coole, from the time he first arrived in 1897, in a state of physical and psychological exhaustion from which he was nursed back to health by Lady Gregory. He once described Coole to fellow poet John Masefield as the most beautiful place in the world. While he stayed, he really lived in another world. As he wandered the woods and grounds, lost in that landscape of the imagination, he would rarely respond to a greeting from somebody he didn't know, and would only listen 'if you talked of the faeries'. |
The names of many of those who contributed to the Literary Revival are engraved on Lady Gregory's Autograph Tree - the Copper Beech in the walled garden. The first name to be carved on it was that of Yeats himself, whom she asked to cut his initials in the summer of 1898.
3 - John Mansfield
4 - Countess of Cromartie
5 - Augustus John
7 - Douglas Hyde
8 - Lady Augusta Gregory
9 - William Robert Gregory
10 - William Butler Yeats
11 - Sean O'Casey
13 - Violet Martin Ross
