We stayed at the Yeats Country Hotel, which is in the most perfect location at the top of a hill overlooking the entrance to Sligo Harbour and Oyster Island and Coney Island. It's also right beside the beaches at Rosses Point, with Benbulben in the distance. I loved this hotel; it's not the fanciest or most modern hotel, but it has a wonderful creaky old atmosphere - I especially enjoyed the armchairs by the window in one of the sitting rooms, where I spent an hour with my book and a cup of tea one afternoon, looking out at the rain (from my two visits to Sligo the weather seems to be even more changeable than that in Galway - this is quite the statement). The views from the bottom of the hill and of the sea were never static, and on the first day I was overcome by a frenzy of photo-taking with the colours of the landscape changing every five minutes as the weather did its thing - eventually I ran out of steam, however, and realized that as I couldn't spend all of my time in Rosses Point taking pictures of the same thing (effectively), it was probably wise to just Leave The Views Alone. Here are some of those photos:
Rosses Point
Around Sligo
Strandhill
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Before I go (and how could I possibly write about Sligo without including some Irish poetry), here are a couple of WB Yeats' poems; The Fisherman, one of my favourite Leaving Cert poems and one that I still know by heart, and The Lake Isle of Innisfree, with Innisfree being a tiny non-inhabited, non-accessible island in Lough Gill in Sligo (this is a nice piece by the New York Times about the poem). Enjoy!
The Fisherman
Although I can see him still,
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,
It's long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I'd looked in the face
What I had hoped 'twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.
Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down-turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream;
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, “Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.”
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.