"One of Yeats’s stranger ideas to come from the 1890s and the beginning of his immersion in the rituals and beliefs of the Order of the Golden Dawn was his wish -- influenced by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s symbolist play Axël -- to establish a Castle of Heroes on a lake isle in Lough Key, County Roscommon, a lake that would, a half-century later become a very real part of John McGahern’s world when he moved to live with his father in Cootehall, Co Roscommon after the death of his mother." Frank Shovlin • Irish Times

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