Lios an Daill · Co. Sligo
Two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle. That house.
Lissadell is not a village. It is a parish on the north side of Sligo Bay, west of Drumcliff, dominated by a single neoclassical house and the demesne around it. The house was built between 1830 and 1835 for Sir Robert Gore-Booth, the 4th Baronet, to designs by the English architect Francis Goodwin - a Greek Revival pile of grey limestone with tall south-facing windows looking out across Sligo Bay to Knocknarea. The Gore-Booth family lived here for nearly two centuries.
Two children born at Lissadell carried it into history. Constance, born 1868, became Constance Markievicz - Easter Rising commander at the College of Surgeons in 1916, first woman elected to the Westminster House of Commons in 1918, Minister for Labour in the First Dáil. She did not take the Westminster seat. Eva, born 1870, became a published poet and a trade-union organiser among Manchester barmaids and tea-pickers. The two sisters lived very different lives but the bond was lifelong. Yeats spent two long visits at Lissadell in 1894 and 1895 and twenty years after both sisters' deaths wrote the famous elegy that opens the light of evening, Lissadell, great windows open to the south.
The Gore-Booths sold the estate in 2003 to the Dublin barristers Edward Walsh and Constance Cassidy, who undertook a long restoration and reopened the house and demesne to the public. The walled and Alpine gardens were rebuilt. Yeats memorabilia, much of it the largest private collection in the country, is on display. There is a café in the courtyard, woodland walks, and beach access at the bottom of the demesne. The house is open seasonally - typically from Easter through September. Check the website before you drive out.
