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

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 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

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

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

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

Find the MacDermott Roe crypt in Kilronan Burial Ground where O'Carolan is buried

Walk the lake shore at Ballyfarnon where he spent his last years

Learn the name of one O'Carolan tune before you come, and listen for it in a session afterwards

Find out what the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792 was for, and why it had to happen then

Come to Keadue for the O'Carolan Harp Festival held there each summer

Turlough O'Carolan was blinded by smallpox at eighteen and apprenticed to a harper by the MacDermott Roe family, who employed his father in Roscommon. He spent the next fifty years riding from house to house from one end of Ireland to the other composing tunes for whoever put him up, and he is the last great figure of a tradition that was already ending — harpers in the old Irish manner were still alive in 1792, when ten of them were gathered at the Belfast Harp Festival so their music could be written down before it went. He died on 25 March 1738 and lies in the MacDermott Roe family crypt at Kilronan, near Ballyfarnon. His tunes are still played nightly by people with no idea whose they are.

O'Carolan's Grave: The Blind Harper of the Big Houses

Climb Sliabh an Iarainn to 585m above Lough Allen

Look down on the drumlin field the glaciers left in the lowlands

Find the iron workings the mountain is named for

Walk or drive the Lough Allen shore below the mountain

Sliabh an Iarainn means the iron mountain, and it is named for what was taken out of it — ore worked here for centuries, feeding the ironworks that gave this corner of Leitrim its industry. It rises 585 metres east of Lough Allen, part of the Cuilcagh range, and the ice that shaped it heaped the lowlands below into thousands of drumlins. In legend it is where the Tuatha Dé Danann first landed in Ireland.

Sliabh an Iarainn: The Iron Mountain Over Lough Allen

Walk under the sixteen limestone arches of the 1860 viaduct

See Borris House, held by the MacMurrough Kavanaghs in an unbroken Gaelic line

Walk a stretch of the Barrow Way below the village

Look up at Mount Leinster from the village street

Borris House is the ancestral home of the MacMurrough Kavanaghs, who claim descent from the kings of Leinster — one of the very few Gaelic families to hold their land right through. Below the village runs the viaduct locals call the Sixteen Bridges: sixteen arches of limestone built in 1860 to a design by William Richard Le Fanu, carrying a railway that no longer exists across the valley. The village also has one of the oldest golf courses in Ireland.