WB Yeats wrote of its "Great windows open to the south", and the "Two girls in silk kimonos, Both beautiful..." who lived there.
Now Lissadell House in Co Sligo is for sale for the first time in its 170-year history, and the Irish government is under pressure to ensure that the childhood home of Countess Markiewicz, heroine of the Irish struggle for independence and inspiration to Yeats, one of the greatest modern poets, is preserved for posterity.
The Anglo-Irish Gore-Booth family has lived in the area for more than 400 years, and at one time its estate stretched to 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres). But huge maintenance costs have driven the family to put the house on the market for €3m (£2.17m).
Campaigners are urging the government to snap up the stately home to keep it out of the hands of property developers, who they fear may destroy a vital part of Ireland's political and literary heritage.
Lissadell was designed by the London architect Francis Goodwin for Sir Robert Gore-Booth MP in 1830, and five years later the elegant grey limestone Georgian mansion, set in 160 hectares of parkland on the northern shore of Sligo Bay, was complete.
The daughters of the Arctic explorer Henry Gore-Booth, Constance, who later married a Polish count and fought in the 1916 Easter Rising, and her sister, Eva, a writer, spent their summers at Lissadell.
Yeats, a frequent visitor, was captivated by the sisters' beauty and the surrounding landscape, now known as Yeats country because it influenced so much of his work. He is buried nearby in Drumcliffe churchyard.
The sisters in turn were stirred by his poetry, his stories from Irish mythology and folklore, and his passionate political ideas.
Born in 1868, Constance could have settled for the life of a fashionable London lady, but she decided to use her aristocratic influence to fight for justice and equality for the poor, women, and the Irish nationalist cause.
Her conscience was pricked by seeing hungry tenants evicted from their homes in the west of Ireland because they could not pay their rent. She helped supply food to them, and later joined the suffragette movement.
In 1893 she studied art in London and Paris before marrying Casimir Dunin-Markiewicz, a rich artist. The couple returned to Dublin where the countess attended Sinn Fein meetings and founded a weapons-training group for boys.
She had already been in jail several times for her revolutionary activities when she was sentenced to death by the British authorities for taking part in the 1916 rebellion, after which Yeats wrote the famous poem, Easter 1916: "All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born."
The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she was released under a general amnesty in 1917.
She was the first woman elected to the British parliament, but in common with other Sinn Fein members refused to take her seat in Westminster, becoming instead labour minister in the independent government set up in Dublin.
This was opposed by London, and she was jailed again.
She fought for the republicans in the Irish civil war, joined Fianna Fail, the political party founded by Eamon De Valera in 1926, and was elected again to the Dail, the Irish parliament, in 1927, the year she died.
Josslyn Gore-Booth, the present owner of Lissadell, is the grandson of Countess Markiewicz's brother, also called Josslyn.
His decision to sell has prompted calls for government intervention.
Arthur Morgan, a Sinn Fein member of the Irish parliament, called for the house to be preserved as a "monument to the heroine of the 1916 Rising".
"Sinn Fein believes that it is time for the state to examine the options for reappropriating hereditary estates which are a legacy of our colonial past and have no place in a modern Ireland," he said.
Maura McTighe of the Yeats Society said she would be devastated if the house were destroyed or redeveloped.
"Too much of Ireland has gone into golf courses for Americans," she said.
