The tower or castle that Yeats bought was a sixteeneth century norman castle built by the family de Burgo, or Burke. It consisted of four floors with one room on each, connected by a spiral stone stairway built into the seven-foot thickness of the massive outer wall. Each floor had a window overlooking the river which flowed alongside. At the top here was a flat roof reached by a final steep flight of steps from the floor below.
There is a great view of the surrounding country including Coole's Seven Woods, from its parapets. There were two attached cottages, one of which was in ruins. A walled garden is joined to the cottages and across the road a grove of trees. The Cloon river winds through this low-lying, rolling countryside, dropping over a thirty foot waterfall before it flows past Thoor Ballylee and afterwards disappearing into a underground passage on its way to enter the Atlantic Ocean.
