Destruction of heritage

Coole estate was purchased in 1768 by Robert Gregory on his return to Ireland following service with the East India Company. It remained with the Gregory family until 1927 when it was sold to the state. Residing there at that time was Lady Augusta Gregory, already a legend in her lifetime as a dramatist, folklorist and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre with W.B. Yeats and Edward Martyn.

Lady Gregory's love of Coole and its 'Seven Woods', immortalised by Yeats, is manifested in her writings and those of her literary guests.

"These woods have been well loved, well tended by some who came before me, and my affection has been no less than theirs. The generations of trees have been my care, my comforters. Their companionship has often brought me peace."


Lady Gregory, Coole, 1931
She was one of the most important figures in the Irish Literary Revival of the early 20th century, not only because of her achievements as a playwright, but also because of the way she transformed Coole into a focal point for those who shaped that movement, making it a place they would return to time and time again to talk, to plan, to derive inspiration.

But the woods and lakes at Coole were richer than Yeats divined. The 'Seven Woods', which so enchanted Lady Gregory and her guests, held whispers of a more ancient ancestry, of which the literary visitors were scarcely aware: remnants of the earlier natural forest cover, and the disappearing lake and river are part of the finest turlough complex not merely in Ireland but in all the world.

Lady Gregory died on 22nd May 1932. In one sense, the magic of Coole has been in abeyance since the demolition of the house in 1941, a time when more immediate concerns occupied the minds of most people. Coole-Garyland is now a statutory Nature Reserve managed by the National Parks & Wildlife Service, whose aim is to preserve its rich natural and cultural heritage.

William Lawrence, after which the collection is named, was not himself a photographer, but an early entrepreneur. Realising the huge potential of the medium, he opened a photography studio in Sackville Street in Dublin in 1865. Over a number of years, he employed a team of photographers to capture the many and varied parts of Ireland, including Cork, depicted in these photographs. The full collection consists of 40,000 glass plates mainly from the period 1880-1914, but some plates go back to 1870. Robert French (1841–1917) was employed as his chief photographer in 1880. French took over 30,000 photographs of the “Lawrence Collection”

slowburner wrote: »

Sometimes it is not that simple, sadly.
He is a neighbour and out here in the boonies you can't go cheesing off your neighbours - let alone requesting their prosecution.
The other thing is that he levelled it before it had been listed in the Sites and Monuments Record, so proving its prior existence would be well nigh impossible.
I did inform an archaeologist at the DAHG with responsibility for the area - the reply was that it has happened to tens of thousands of sites.
I suspect he is right.
We have undoubtedly lost thousands of early sites - the remarkable thing is how many have survived.
Maybe we can thank the Romans for that.

slowburner wrote: »

Well, the Romans didn't build all that many forts, roads, spas, boundary walls in Ireland, did they?
If they had, we would have lost more of our early heritage.
Imagine how they would have used up all those ready sorted piles of stones as substrates for their lovely straight roads.