Where the Irish Literary Revival began
The everyday speech of Kiltartan ended up on the stage of the Abbey Theatre. Lady Augusta Gregory lived just south of here at Coole Park, and she turned the dialect of her tenants and neighbours – ‘Kiltartanese’, she called it – into the language of the plays she wrote and gathered with W.B. Yeats. Kiltartan is not a village with a street. It is a scattered civil parish and old barony in south County Galway, loosely gathered around a crossroads near Gort, and almost everything worth stopping for is tied to that one literary moment.
Yeats was forever in these townlands, walking the lanes between Coole and the river and setting the local place-names into his poems. Long before the writers arrived, this was the country of the O’Shaughnessy, Hynes and Mac Redmond families; the name is simply Cill Tartan, marking an old church site.
Castletown Castle
On the west bank of the Gort river stand the ruins of Castletown Castle, also called Kiltartan Castle – a tower house built around 1280 by the de Burgo (Burke) family to hold English interests in Connacht. It is a National Monument now, knocked about by Cromwellian artillery in the 1650s and left as a two-storey shell, with a three-storey spiral stair and narrow slit windows still readable in the stonework. It is a five-minute roadside stop rather than a half-day, but a good one if you like your history unpolished.
The Kiltartan Gregory Museum
The one indoor attraction is the Kiltartan Gregory Museum, in a red-brick schoolhouse built in 1892 for the children of the Gregory tenants and later restored by the local cultural society. A 19th-century schoolroom is kept as it was, alongside manuscripts, photographs and furniture from Lady Gregory’s life – her part in founding the Abbey, her folklore collecting, her ties to the surrounding townlands. The building is said to carry design touches from Sir William Gregory’s years as Governor of Ceylon, though that is more local tradition than documented fact. The museum also holds a deep collection of local genealogical records, drawn on by projects like Ireland Reaching Out.
If you only have time for one thing in Kiltartan, make it the museum, and pair it with Coole Park ten minutes south, where the fuller Gregory story lives.
The cross and Millennium Park
Kiltartan Cross, the crossroads that gives the parish its centre, is a stop on the Lady Gregory and Yeats Heritage Trail. It is bound up with the blind Mayo poet Antoine Ó Raifteirí – Raftery – said to have met Mary Hynes, his ‘Beauty of Ballylee’, here; Yeats wrote about her too. Beside the museum, Millennium Park gives a well-kept green stretch along the Gort river, with an information board on the cross and easy walking on old field paths – good for a short leg-stretch and a bit of birdwatching.
Practical information
Kiltartan sits a few minutes north of Gort, about 30 km south of Galway city and signposted off the main Gort roads. Free parking is available at the museum and Millennium Park.
The museum opens daily 11am–5pm in June, July and August, weekends only in May and September, and by appointment the rest of the year (phone Rena on +353 86 825 2164). Admission is €3 for adults, €1.50 for children and €8 for a family. There is no café or shop at the cross itself, so bring a flask or plan lunch in Gort.
Nearby
- Coole Park – Lady Gregory’s demesne, the autograph tree and the Seven Woods, ten minutes south.
- Gort – the nearest town for cafés and shops, with Thoor Ballylee, Yeats’s tower home, signposted just beyond it.
Chain the three together – Coole Park, Kiltartan and Thoor Ballylee – and you have a full day on the Yeats and Gregory trail.