Ireland Guide
Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon
Lissadell House
Just north of Drumcliffe a signpost points west to Carney and Lissadell House (April– Sept 10.30am–6pm; tours on the hour 11am–5pm; house €6, gardens €5, coach house €5, combined ticket €12; 
www.lissadellhouse.com ), a grey-walled Neoclassical mansion built by Sir Robert Gore-Booth in 1830. The house's notability partly rests on its associations with Yeats who became friends with Robert's granddaughters, Eva and Constance, in the 1890s. Nowadays owned by two Kildare barristers, the house is gradually undergoing restoration and its hugely informative and entertaining tour is well worth taking. The tour begins in the ground-floor billiards room, featuring numerous Gore-Booth family photos and the hunting equipment of the Arctic explorer, Henry Gore-Booth, and then ventures upstairs via an imperial staircase of Kilkenny marble to the pokey little guestroom where Yeats used to stay; on its walls hang some of his brother Jack's early cartoons and pictures of boatmen.
Returning downstairs, the next stop is the gallery-cum-music-room, designed like a Greek temple and featuring ten-bulb gasoliers – Lissadell was the first house in Ireland to be gas-lit – before passing through a pre-prandial anteroom; note where Constance has engraved her name on a window, and her charcoal pictures, which were produced during a stint in Paris. The dining room itself, equipped with an Egyptian-style plaster ceiling, has entrancing full-scale mural portraits by Constance's husband, Count Casimir Markiewicz, featuring her brother Jocelyn and family retainers. Constance herself played a major role in the 1916 Easter Rising, though by 1918 had not only been elected as Britain's first woman MP, but also subsequently became Minister of Labour in the Dáil's first post-Independence cabinet.
Downstairs, the servants' hall features numerous drawings by Eva Gore-Booth, Yeats's confidante as he struggled to come to terms with his unrequited love for Maud Gonne, as well as an elaborate butler's indicator-box whose lights provided details about where his services were currently required.
To the house's northwest stands the recently restored Coach House (same hours), home to both a tearoom and an exhibition devoted to the Countess Markiewicz which includes a wealth of memorabilia, photographs and paintings, the last including a somewhat chilling death-bed portrait by her husband Casimir. Elsewhere in the estate the walled kitchen garden and seaside alpine garden (both same hours) have undergone massive reinvigoration and feature a wealth of rare plants, including a variety of Lissadell's own daffodil strains, as well as extremely enjoyable walks.