Grange, An Ghráinseach, Co. Sligo

Where three Spanish galleons came ashore, and the cannons are still being recovered.

Grange is a small village on the N15 between Drumcliff and Cliffony, twenty kilometres north of Sligo town. Most people drive through without stopping. The reason to stop is the long, flat strand a kilometre west - Streedagh - where on the 21st of September 1588 three ships of the Spanish Armada came ashore in a westerly gale. Over a thousand men died on the beach or were killed by the English in the hours after. One Spanish captain, Francisco de Cuéllar, survived, hid in the woods and the bogs of Sligo and Leitrim for weeks, made it eventually to Antrim and then to Scotland, and wrote one of the great survival narratives of the Tudor period - his Carta, addressed to Philip II, is still in print.

The wreck is still working. The big storms of 2014 and 2015 stripped sand off the seabed and exposed the timbers of La Juliana. The National Monuments Service brought up nine bronze cannon and a bronze cauldron in a controlled excavation - the single largest haul of guns from any Spanish Armada wreck in the world. The Grange Armada Centre on the main street tells the story and rotates the artefacts. It is a small museum doing serious work.

Behind the strand the land rises gently into Lissadell, the Gore-Booth demesne where the young Yeats stayed in the 1890s. South is Drumcliff with the poet's grave. North is Mullaghmore and the Mountbatten coast. Grange is not a destination on its own - it is the village at the centre of north Sligo's best half-day. Use it as a base, drive the points, eat at the pub on the way back.