the Yeats 150th Anniversary in June 2015. The Society is cooperating with the National Yeats Steering Committee and the Yeats Society to ensure that Thoor Ballylee is an integrated part of the Yeats 2015 celebrations. In early December 2015, Storm Desmond devastated parts of Ireland with flooding rain and damaging winds. Thoor Ballylee, and the adjacent cottage, were both damaged by several feet of flood water. Architecture With four floors, the tower consists of one room on each floor that is connected by a spiral stone stairway built into the seven-foot thickness of the massive outer wall. Each floor has a window that overlooks the Streamstown River that flows alongside the tower. There is a small thatch cottage attached. Yeats described the ground-floor chamber as "the pleasantest room I have yet seen, a great wide window opening over the river and a round arched door leading to the thatched hall". He also admired the mural stair, symbolically declaring "This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair; That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have traveled there." There is a tablet on the wall that commemorates Yeats' sojourn: I, the poet William Yeats, With old mill boards and sea-green slates, And smithy work from the Gort forge, Restored this tower for my wife George. And may these characters remain When all is ruin once again. See also William Butler Yeats References External links The Lady Gregory and Yeats Heritage Trail National Inventory of Architectural Heritage: Yeats' Tower National Inventory of Architectural Heritage: Ballylee Bridge W.B. Yeats poem about the Tower W. B. Yeats Castles in County Galway Tourist attractions in County Galway Tower houses in the Republic of Ireland