Baile Idir Dhá Abhainn · Co. Sligo
A small Georgian estate village at the foot of Carrowkeel, with a folk park and a country house.
Riverstown sits in the south-east corner of Sligo, between Lough Arrow and the Bricklieve Mountains, fifteen kilometres south-east of Sligo town. The name means the town between two rivers — the Unshin runs through the middle, the Owenboy joins it just below. The village is small: a green, a couple of pubs, a primary school, a community hall. The reasons to come are around it rather than in it.
Carrowkeel is the big one. Up in the Bricklieves above the village, fourteen passage tombs sit on a high limestone shelf — built between roughly 3,200 and 2,400 BC, contemporary with Newgrange and Maeshowe in Orkney. You drive up to the gate, park on the grass, walk fifteen minutes up the bog road, and you are inside one of the most important Neolithic cemeteries in Western Europe. There is no visitor centre. There are no rope barriers. Cairn G aligns with the midsummer sunset and you can crawl into the chamber to see it — bring a torch and trust the limestone.
Sligo Folk Park at the edge of the village is a community-run heritage attraction built around Millview House — a small farmhouse put up in 1873 by George Reid, a local farmer and shoemaker. A forge, a thatched cottage, a creamery, a parish schoolroom and a small museum of agricultural objects sit around the original house. It opens seasonally and runs traditional craft days.
Two kilometres west is Coopershill, the Georgian seat of the O'Hara family — completed in 1774, married into the O'Haras in 1810, same family seven generations later. The house is open as country-house accommodation. Their red deer herd runs on the estate and supplies the venison on the kitchen table. Riverstown is a small village. It is also the door to four serious things.