1821, and still pointing
The Metal Man
A twelve-foot painted cast-iron sailor in the uniform of a Royal Navy petty officer, cast in London by Thomas Kirk in 1819 and set on Perch Rock at the mouth of Sligo Harbour in 1821. He points one arm at the safe channel for ships coming in. He has an identical twin on the cliffs above Tramore, Co. Waterford. The Sligo merchants who paid for him got the better posting — out on his rock in the middle of the bay, twenty feet above the water, doing the job he was made for two hundred years on.
Elsinore, Moyle, and the Middleton boats
The Yeats summers
W.B. and Jack Yeats's mother Susan was a Pollexfen, daughter of a Sligo shipping family. Her Middleton cousins kept summer houses out at Rosses Point — Elsinore down by the sea, Moyle Lodge up the hill — and the brothers spent long summers here as boys in the 1870s and 1880s. They rowed in the river mouth, were taken out in a heavy schooner yacht, and absorbed the sea-and-sailor imagery that runs through both bodies of work after. W.B. came back as a young man in 1887 to stay with his uncle George Pollexfen at Moyle Lodge while he wrote The Wanderings of Oisin.
A story everyone tells
Two Coney Islands
There is a Coney Island in Sligo Bay — a tidal island you can walk to at low tide across a causeway of fourteen pillars. The local tradition is that the New York Coney Island took its name from this one, by way of a Captain Peter O'Connor of the schooner Arethusa who sailed between Sligo and New York in the late 1700s and thought the Brooklyn island looked like the Sligo one. It is one of several competing origin stories for the Brooklyn name and not the one historians lean on hardest. Sligo people tell it anyway, and you should hear it told before you weigh it.
Watching the channel in
The Pilot's Lookout
On the headland above the Second Beach sits a small white tower — the Pilot's Lookout. Sligo harbour was busy in the 19th century with timber, emigrants, and grain, and the channel through the bay is shallow and narrow. The harbour pilots watched from this tower for ships coming in, then went out in a boat to bring them through. The trade has gone; the tower is still there; the view is what you walk up for now.