Visit County Sligo, the area of Ireland that inspired the poet W. B. Yeats

Visit County Sligo, the area of Ireland that inspired the poet W. B. Yeats

The world famous Nobel Prize winner and Irish writer and poet, W. B. Yeats was born in Dublin, but his parents were from County Sligo where he spent a large proportion of his childhood and inspired many of his works of literature. This is thanks largely to the regions mountain scenery, lakes, waterfalls, woods and miles of coastline, beaches and cliffs.

County Sligo in the north west of Ireland is today known as Yeats Country and can be visited by renting a car from Dublin and travelling west across the country to the Atlantic Coast.

As well as being renowned for the part it played in Yeats’ poetry, Sligo has many places to visit and enjoy including the Ox mountains to the west of the county that form a background to the coastal plain of the area. To the north of the town of Sligo, the landscape is dominated by large, steep-sided limestone hills, the most famous being Ben Bulben.

The county is also home to Lough Arrow, with its bays, coves and surrounding hills and closer to Sligo town lies Lough Gill, where the Lake Isle of Innisfree can be seen, which was celebrated in the Yeats poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade…

William Butler Yeats.

County Sligo also boasts one of the best collections of megalithic tombs in the whole of Europe, with Carrowmore one of the oldest stone-age burial sites of its type. Here visitors can find hundreds of tombs, passage graves, stone circles and dolmens.

The Knocknarea Mountain range within the county has a large flat-topped cairn called Maeve’s Cairn at it s summit, in recognition of the Iron Age Queen of Connaught, Queen Meave.

Visitors to Ireland with an interest in the literature of Yeats or those who wish to enjoy the scenery of Sligo will appreciate this area of Ireland, which also makes for a good base from which to discover other areas of the country, with Connacht and Ulster just a few hours drive away.



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