The Northwest Places
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Sligo Town
Sligo, the only sizable town in the whole of Northwest Ireland, is the best place to begin a tour of Yeats Country. Since the early 2000s, the streets have been ringing with the bite of buzz saws, as apartments, shopping malls, and cinema complexes have been erected behind tasteful, traditional facades although some of the building development has now tapered off. By day Sligo is as lively and crowded as its considerably larger neighbor to the southwest, Galway, with locals, students from the town's college, and tourists bustling past its historic buildings and along its narrow sidewalks and winding streets, and crowding its one-of-a-kind shops, restaurants, and traditional pubs. More than any other town in Northwest Ireland, the Sligo of today has an energy that would surprise anyone who hasn't been here in the past few years.
Squeezed onto a patch of land between Sligo Bay and Lough Gill, the town is clustered on the south shore between two bridges that span the River Garavogue, just east of where the river opens into the bay. Thanks to the pedestrian zone along the south shore of the river (between the two bridges), you can enjoy vistas of the river while right in the center of town. All along High Street and Church and Charles streets, Sligo has churches of almost every denomination. Presbyterians, Methodists, and even Plymouth Brethren are represented, as are Anglicans (Church of Ireland) and, of course, Roman Catholics. According to the Irish writer Sean O'Faolain,"The best Protestant stock in all Ireland is in Sligo." The Yeats family was part of that stock.
Sligo was often a battleground in its earlier days. It was attacked by Viking invaders in 807; later, it was invaded by a succession of rival Irish and Anglo-Norman conquerors. In 1642 the British soldiers of Sir Frederick Hamilton fell upon Sligo, killing every visible inhabitant, burning the town, and destroying the interior of the beautiful medieval abbey. Between 1845 and 1849, more than a million inhabitants of Sligo County died in the potato famine or fled to escape it—an event poignantly captured in a letter written in 1850 by a local father, Owen Larkin, to his son in America. Its words are inscribed on a brass plaque down by the river: "I am now I may say alone in the world all my brothers and sisters are dead and children but yourself. We are all ejected out of Lord Ardilaun's ground, the times was so bad and all Ireland in such a state of poverty that no person could pay rent. My only hope now rests with you, as I am without one shilling and I must either beg or go to the poorhouse." Stand here a moment by the river, then turn again to the bustling heart of Sligo, and marvel at humanity's capacity to rise above adversity.
