POSTED FROM

DRUMCLIFF

CO. SLIGO · IE

Drumcliff
Droim Chliabh

The Wild Atlantic Way
STOP 02 / 06

Droim Chliabh · Co. Sligo

Yeats's grave under Ben Bulben, and a monastery that started a war.

Drumcliff is small. A church, a tea house, a graveyard, a round tower stub, a high cross, and a mountain doing most of the talking. You can park, walk the lot, read the headstone, and be back in the car in forty minutes. Most people are. That is the wrong way to do it.

The graveyard is the headline because of Yeats, and Yeats earned the headline. He died in the south of France in January 1939, was buried there during the war, and was brought home in September 1948 on the Irish naval corvette Macha. His grandfather had been rector of this church. He had asked, in a late poem, to be laid "under bare Ben Bulben's head". The grave is plain. The epitaph is the last three lines of "Under Ben Bulben". Stand there long enough and it stops being a literary stop and starts being a graveyard.

But the ground is older than the poem. St Colmcille — Columba to the English-speakers — founded a monastery on this spot around 574, in the years after the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne was fought just up the road. The battle in 561 was, depending on who you ask, the world's first copyright dispute: Colmcille had copied a psalter without permission, the high king ruled against him, and the fight that followed sent him into exile on Iona. The monastery he left behind grew, was raided by Vikings, lost its tower top to a lightning strike in 1396, and quietly slipped under the present Church of Ireland building. The high cross at the gate — biblical scenes, weathered to soft outlines — has been standing there for a thousand years.

Spend an hour. Read the cross. Walk the back of the churchyard where the older stones lean. Then look up at Ben Bulben and put the poem back where it came from.

Population

~250

Walk score

Church, round tower, high cross — all within a hundred paces

Founded

Monastery founded by St Colmcille, c. 574

Coords

54.3261° N, 8.5006° W

01 / 07

At a glance.

Three things every local will eventually mention. Read these and you've already understood more than most day-trippers do.

01 The grave

Yeats lies in the churchyard.

Died in France in 1939, reinterred here in 1948. The stone reads as he asked it to: "Cast a cold eye / On life, on death / Horseman, pass by!" Bring your own horseman.

Stories & lore → 02 The mountain

Ben Bulben sits over the road.

526 metres of limestone table, sheer on three sides. Yeats put it in the poems. The Fianna put it in the legends. You will not stop photographing it.

Walks & outings → 03 The monastery

Round tower stub, tenth-century high cross.

Colmcille founded the place in 574. The tower lost its cap to lightning in 1396. The high cross — scripture scenes carved in sandstone — is one of the few that still stand in Sligo.

Stories & lore →

02 / 07

Where to eat.

Place	Type	€	Local note
Drumcliff Tea House & Craft Shop	Cafe & craft shop	€	The practical stop. Beside the church, beside the car park. Soup, sandwiches, scones, a decent coffee, a craft shop attached. Open daily in season. Buses arrive in waves; time your visit between them.

03 / 07

Stories & lore.

The reason to come back. The things every local will eventually tell you about, usually after the second pint.

Roquebrune to Drumcliff

Yeats came home in 1948

W. B. Yeats died at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera on 28 January 1939, and was buried there because the war was about to make moving a body impossible. Nine years later, in September 1948, the Irish naval ship LÉ Macha brought his remains home and they were reinterred in Drumcliff churchyard on the 17th. There is a long and unresolved argument about whether the bones in the grave are entirely his — the French ossuary records are murky — and the family have politely declined to settle it. The stone is the one he wrote.

Cúl Dreimhne, 561

The Battle of the Book

Tradition puts the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne at the foot of Ben Bulben in 561, and tradition puts the cause at a copied book. Colmcille had borrowed a psalter from St Finnian of Movilla and made himself a copy. Finnian wanted the copy. The high king Diarmait mac Cerbaill ruled in Finnian's favour with the line, "To every cow its calf, to every book its copy." Colmcille's people fought the king's people. Three thousand were said to have died. Colmcille, in penance, sailed to Iona and never returned. The monastery at Drumcliff was founded a few years later, on what was either the battlefield or near enough to count.

A stub with a story

The round tower and the lightning

The round tower at Drumcliff is one of the smaller ruins on the site — about nine metres of it left standing on the west side of the road, opposite the church. It was built sometime between the 10th and 12th centuries. In 1396, according to the Annals of the Four Masters, lightning struck the top off it. Nobody ever put the top back. The bottom has been there for six hundred and thirty years since, which is its own kind of stubborn.

A bible in sandstone

The high cross

The 10th-century high cross at the church gate is the survivor — most of Sligo's high crosses are gone or fragmentary. The east face shows Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Daniel in the lions' den. The west face shows the Crucifixion and Christ in Glory. The carving has been softened by a millennium of Atlantic weather but the scenes still read. Walk around it slowly. The guidebooks rush you past it on the way to the grave.

04 / 07

Things to do outside.

Wear waterproofs. Bring a sandwich. Tell someone where you're going if it's the mountain.

Benbulbin Forest Walk Start from the Coillte car park at Barnaribbon, four kilometres east of Drumcliff. The path loops the lower slopes of Ben Bulben through forestry and out onto open ground with the limestone wall above you. Not a summit walk — for that you want the guided route from Luke's Bridge — but the closest most people will get to the mountain on foot.

5.5 km loopdistance

1h 30mtime

Glencar Waterfall Eleven kilometres east toward Manorhamilton. Yeats's "pools among the rushes / That scarce could bathe a star" — the waterfall in "The Stolen Child". A short boardwalk to the falls, picnic tables, a cafe at the car park. After heavy rain the wind blows the water back up the cliff.

500m there and backdistance

15 minutestime

Drumcliff churchyard and monastic site The grave, the round tower stub across the road, the high cross at the gate, the older stones at the back of the yard. Free, open all hours. Bring a one-euro coin for the church donations box and read the panels inside.

Under 1 kmdistance

30–45 minutestime

Streedagh Strand Ten minutes north. A long, flat strand where three ships of the Spanish Armada wrecked in September 1588. The dune walk to the headland is the one to do. On a clear day Ben Bulben is over your shoulder the whole way.

3 km of beachdistance

However long you havetime

05 / 07

When to go.

There is no bad time. There are different times.

Spring

Mar–May

Light is good, coaches have not started in earnest, the churchyard is quiet enough to read. Ben Bulben still wears the last of the winter on its top.

◉ Go

Summer

Jun–Aug

Coach tours roll in from Sligo and from Galway and from Donegal on the Yeats trail. Time your visit before 11 or after 4. The tea house queue will tell you how you did.

◐ Mind yourself

Autumn

Sep–Oct

The best window. The light goes long and gold on Ben Bulben, the visitor numbers ease, and the 17th of September anniversary of the reinterment usually brings a small reading at the grave.

◉ Go

Winter

Nov–Feb

The tea house pares its hours back. The churchyard is open and properly atmospheric. Bring a coat that means it — the wind off Ben Bulben does not negotiate.

◐ Mind yourself

06 / 07

What to skip.

Honestly? Don't bother.

If a local was sitting beside you, this is the bit where they'd lean in.

Pulling in for ten minutes on a coach itinerary

Yeats's grave is not a photo stop. Park, walk the cross, the tower, the older stones, then look up at the mountain that earned the poem. Forty minutes minimum. An hour is better.

Climbing Ben Bulben unguided in cloud

The mountain looks tame from the road and is not. The summit plateau has unfenced drops on three sides and the cloud sits low for days at a time. Use a guided walk from Luke's Bridge or wait for a clear day.

Looking for a pub in Drumcliff

There isn't one to speak of. The village is the church, the tea house, the petrol station and the road. Drive eight kilometres south for Sligo town, or fifteen north for Grange and Mullaghmore.

Trusting the photogenic angle of Ben Bulben from the church car park

Everyone takes that shot. Drive five minutes north to the layby on the N15 before Grange, or south to the Drumcliff river bridge, and the mountain reads better in both.

Getting there.

By car

Sligo town to Drumcliff is 8km north on the N15 — about 10 minutes. From Bundoran it is 30km south, about 30 minutes. The car park beside the church is free.

By bus

Bus Éireann route 480 (Sligo–Derry) and Local Link Sligo services stop at Drumcliff on the N15. Several services daily; fewer on Sundays.

By train

Nearest station is Sligo (Mac Diarmada), 8km south. Two hours and fifteen minutes from Dublin Connolly. Then bus, taxi, or a 15-minute cycle on the back road.

By air

Ireland West (Knock) is 90km / 1h 15m. City of Derry is 130km. Dublin is 215km / 2h 45m.