The beeping of audio-visual aids is to sound a few yards from the last resting place of the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats, who once craved for the peace of the lake isle of Innisfree and hoped that his grave would be left in quietness.
Yeats -- who called himself one of poetry's "last romantics" -- included an emphatic command to posterity in the epitaph he chose for his burial place under Ben Bulben mountain on the Irish coast near Sligo."Cast a cold eye on life, on death," he wrote. "Horseman, pass by"!
But for local authorities, the problem is that too many people have been paying homage at his tomb, which now draws 80,000 to 90,000 visitors a year, and passing by the church. To get them inside, parishioners and the Irish government are spending $1.08 million on revamping the place and introducing high technology.
Drumcliffe church is to have its tea room turned into a visitors center with computers and an audio-visual presentation.
The center will stress Drumcliffe's links with a more sanctified historical figure, the evangelist St. Columba. It's the site of the first Irish monastery built by Columba in the mid-sixth century.
Yeats and his brother Jack spent much of their childhood playing on the beaches and mountains near Sligo. As adults, they wrote and painted there, in a terrain swirling with legends not only of saints but of the warrior Finn MacCool.
Yeats died in France in 1934 at the age of 74.
His reputation has led the area around the county town of 18,000 residents to be designated "the Yeats country," with tourism boosted by a yearly international summer school. Yet Drumcliffe church has been left out.
The rector, Canon Ian Gallagher, said many visitors left disappointed.