Coole Park is a nature reserve of approximately located a few miles west of Gort, County Galway, Ireland. It is managed 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: a three-storey house with a square porch and as principal rooms a dining room and drawing-room with bay windows facing out to Coole Lough and the Burren Hills, and a library in between them. In 1880, Robert's great-grandson, William Henry Gregory married Isabella Augusta Persse, who became Lady Gregory. The death in World War I of their only child, Robert, a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, inspired the poet W B Yeats to write works which included "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death." 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 Yeats, Edward Martyn, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Mario Manlio Rossi and Seán O'Casey. 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). Margaret Gregory, the widowed wife of Robert Gregory, sold the estate to the Irish state in 1927, with life tenancy for her mother-in-law. Lady Gregory 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. Indeed, according to the National Archives, the