Walk among the tombs at Carrowmore and find Listoghil at the centre

Find out how many tombs were destroyed after 1800

Climb Knocknarea to the great cairn of Miosgán Médhbh

Look back from Knocknarea's summit over Carrowmore and Sligo Bay

Carrowmore has 30 surviving megalithic tombs, with another 25 destroyed since 1800, which makes it one of the four great passage-tomb clusters in Ireland with Carrowkeel, Loughcrew and Brú na Bóinne. Most of them are satellite tombs round the largest monument on the high point of the plateau, the restored cairn called Listoghil. To the west the whole landscape is dominated by Knocknarea, with the great cairn of Miosgán Médhbh on its summit — one of the largest cairns in Ireland, by tradition the grave of Queen Medb and believed to hold a Neolithic passage tomb.

Carrowmore and Knocknarea: Medb's Cairn

Carrowmore and Knocknarea

Six nights across Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon, from the passage tombs of Carrowmore and Carrowkeel to the royal complex at Rathcroghan, with Boyle Abbey and a coal mine on the way.

The Passage Tombs of the West: Carrowmore, Carrowkeel and Rathcroghan

Take a seaweed bath at Voya in Strandhill, reviving a tradition of Sligo bathhouses that goes back to 1912

Walk Strandhill Beach right outside, one of Ireland's best-known surf beaches beneath Knocknarea

Look up at Knocknarea's summit cairn from the beach — the unexcavated cairn linked to Queen Maeve

Find out how Voya founder Neil Walton brought the seaweed-bathing tradition back to his home town in 2000

Sligo had a string of seaweed bathhouses along this coast from 1912, and by the end of the century they had all but gone. Neil Walton brought the tradition back to his own town in 2000, and Voya now runs hot seawater baths with fresh-cut Atlantic seaweed steeped in them, which is exactly what the Victorian bathhouses did. It sits directly behind Strandhill beach, one of the best-known surf breaks in the country, with the unexcavated cairn on top of Knocknarea — said to be Queen Maeve's grave — looking down on the whole thing.

Voya Seaweed Baths: Strandhill's Century-Old Tradition

Surf at Strandhill, the Atlantic beach below Knocknarea

From Drumcliffe, look up at Benbulben's 526m flat-topped ridge — the mountain named in Yeats' own epitaph

Find W.B. Yeats' grave in Drumcliff churchyard and read the epitaph from 'Under Ben Bulben': 'Cast a cold Eye / On Life, on Death. / Horseman, pass by.'

Find the round tower and the high cross of about 1100 beside the church, all that is left of the monastery at Drumcliff

Sligo pairs Atlantic surf with literary pilgrimage: Strandhill faces the Atlantic below Knocknarea, and W.B. Yeats is buried in Drumcliff churchyard, where his paternal great-grandfather John Yeats had been rector. Benbulbin's flat-topped 526m ridge rises behind the grave, the mountain named in the poet's own epitaph.

Drumcliff and Strandhill: Yeats' Grave Under Benbulben

Take a boat out onto Lough Gill and find Innisfree, the tiny uninhabited island that gave Yeats' 1888 poem its title

Note the local claim that Church Island, not Innisfree itself, better matches the poem's description — Innisfree is really too small to live on

Explore the Yeats exhibition at Sligo County Museum

Walk Sligo town's streets that Yeats knew as a boy, now home to the Yeats Building and Society

Yeats wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree in 1888 while homesick in London, and the island is really out there on Lough Gill — though locals will tell you Church Island fits the poem better, because Innisfree itself is far too small to build a cabin on. That argument is part of the pleasure of taking a boat out. Sligo town, where he spent his boyhood summers, now holds the Yeats Building and the Yeats Society, and the county museum keeps the exhibition devoted to him.

Yeats Country: Innisfree and Lough Gill

Walk the Benbulbin Forest loop under the northern cliffs

Look at the flat top and work out how a plateau became a table

Find out about the arctic-alpine plants on the cliff ledges — fringed sandwort grows here and nowhere else in Ireland, and the ledges themselves are unstable and out of bounds

Visit Yeats's grave at Drumcliffe in the mountain's shadow

Benbulbin is 526 metres of flat-topped limestone standing over the Sligo plain, and its shape is the record of an ice age: it was a plateau, and the glaciers cut it away on every side until only this table was left standing above the ice as a nunatak. Its flat-topped profile is one of the most recognisable mountain outlines in Ireland. Yeats is buried in its shadow at Drumcliffe, and in the old story it is where Diarmaid was killed by the boar while Gráinne waited.

Benbulbin: The Table Mountain of Yeats Country

Walk on to the Devil's Chimney after heavy rain and watch the water blow back up over the cliff in a southerly

Read The Stolen Child at the falls Yeats named in it

Walk or drive the length of Glencar Lough under the Dartry Mountains

Yeats wrote The Stolen Child in 1886 and collected it in The Wanderings of Oisin three years later, and the fairies in it call the child away to where the wandering water gushes from the hills above Glen-Car. The waterfall is still there, dropping about fifteen metres into a wooded glen at the end of a short boardwalk from the car park, A kilometre west of it is a second fall, Sruth in Aghaidh an Aird — the Devil's Chimney — at 150 metres the highest in Ireland, and its name is the point: in a southerly wind the water blows backwards, up and over the cliff edge, instead of falling. Glencar Lough runs west along the valley, the Dartry Mountains to the north and Cope's Mountain to the south.

Glencar: The Waterfall in Yeats's Stolen Child

Tour Parke's Castle on the shore of Lough Gill and find the footprint of the O'Rourke tower house inside it

Walk to Creevelea Abbey on the west bank of the Bonet

Find the carvings in the Creevelea cloister

Work out what it means that one site is Gaelic and the other is the plantation that replaced it

Brian O'Rourke, the last Gaelic lord of West Bréifne to hold this ground, was executed by the English crown and his tower house confiscated. Captain Robert Parke leased the site in the 1630s and built a plantation manor house inside the old bawn — so what stands on Lough Gill today is an English house wrapped around the footprint of the Gaelic castle it replaced. West of the village on the Bonet stands Creevelea, founded in 1508 by Eóghan O'Rourke and his wife Margaret O'Brian, daughter of a King of Thomond: the last Franciscan friary built in Ireland before the Dissolution.

Dromahair: Parke's Castle and the Last Franciscan Abbey

Climb Fanad Head Lighthouse on a guided tour

Find out what happened to HMS Saldanha on the night of 4 December 1811

Look out over the mouth of Lough Swilly, one of Ireland's three glacial fjords

Walk the beach at Ballymastocker Bay, where the Saldanha was wrecked

Stay a night in one of the restored lightkeepers' houses

On the evening of 4 December 1811 the frigate HMS Saldanha was last seen passing Fanad Head in a storm; next morning she was found wrecked in Ballymastocker Bay inside Lough Swilly, with no human survivors, and about 200 bodies came ashore. The story goes that the ship's parrot survived and was found the next year with a ring round its neck engraved with the captain's name. The wreck led to the lighthouse on Fanad Head, designed by George Halpin and first lit on 17 March 1817. It is one of the Great Lighthouses of Ireland: you can climb the tower on a guided tour and stay in the three restored keepers' houses. It looks out over the mouth of Lough Swilly, one of Ireland's three glacial fjords, and down the shore at Portsalon is Ballymastocker Bay, whose beach The Observer once named the second most beautiful in the world.

Fanad Head: The Lighthouse Built for the Saldanha

Drive the narrow road up from Teelin to Bunglass for the view of the cliffs

Walk the Pilgrim Path up from Teelin to the ruins of Aodh Mac Bricne's church and well

Find the remains of the beehive huts on the plateau

Look along the ridge to One Man's Pass, and cross it only if you are an experienced hill walker

At 601 metres, Slieve League has the second-highest sea cliffs in Ireland, after Croaghaun on Achill, and some of the highest in Europe. The classic view is from Bunglass, at the end of a narrow road up from the fishing village of Teelin. On the landward side the Pilgrim Path climbs a U-shaped valley above Teelin to the ruins of the church and well of Aodh Mac Bricne, a 6th-century bishop who is said to have spent his last years as a hermit on the mountain, with the remains of beehive huts around them. Beyond, the ridge narrows to One Man's Pass.