SEVERAL HUNDRED visitors to Lissadell House near Sligo marked its reopening at the weekend following closure to the public for more than 18 months.
A new Yeats family gallery, with the last photograph taken of poet WB Yeats, seen for the first time, was a “great draw” according to the owners. The picture was taken by Yeats’s wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, less than a week before he died in 1939.
Lissadell House had been closed as a tourist attraction since January 2009 when a legal dispute flared over rights of way through the estate between Sligo County Council and owners Edward Walsh and his wife Constance Cassidy, who bought it in 2003.
A High Court decision on the row is due this autumn.
The owners decided to reopen the estate as a tourist attraction until the end of this season following work done for the Westlife and Leonard Cohen concerts the weekend before last.
Cohen officially opened the new Yeats gallery before continuing on his tour of Europe.
It’s the first Yeats exhibition in the house since a 1943 fire destroyed the main coach house.
Yeats, who lived at nearby Drumcliffe, was a regular visitor to Lissadell and the young Countess Constance Markievicz and her sister Eva Gore-Booth.
In addition to the Yeats gallery, callers can now see the Markievicz gallery, a natural history and shell exhibition, and gardens.