The name itself, from the Irish word for a tilled field, is quietly doubled here, the place giving its name to both the town and the surrounding townland in a way that speaks to deep, layered settlement.

The wider Gort area was closely associated with the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lady Augusta Gregory, playwright and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, lived at Coole Park just outside the town, and W. B. Yeats was a regular visitor. The nearby Tower of Thoor Ballylee, a sixteenth-century Norman tower house that Yeats purchased and restored in 1917, became one of the more unusual domestic experiments in Irish literary history. The landscape around Gort also includes Coole Lough, whose waters drain through the karst geology and eventually emerge at Kinvara on the coast, a subterranean journey of several kilometres that has fascinated naturalists and geographers for generations.