LISSADELL, CO. SLIGO

Lissadell is a very personal place for me, the austere, 1830's, grey stone mansion of the Gore-Booth family on Sligo Bay, which I used to visit every summer with my father: an easy architectural excursion on our Irish seaside holiday. The house is a fascinating essay in severe neoclassicism, with bold detailing and a tall, top-lit gallery at its centre, above. The poet Yeats, who lived nearby, wrote about his friends the famous Gore-Booth girls, 'both beautiful, one a gazelle,' Eva and Constance, who married Casimir Markiewicz, a Polish artist, before becoming a leader of the Easter Rising of 1916 and one of the founders of the Irish Republic. Casimir painted the figures on the dining-room pilasters in 1908: his brothers-in-law flanking the fireplace, the gamekeeper and butler by the sideboard.