Walk Yeats Country
Benbulben, Lissadell, Glencar — a short drive through the landscape that shaped W. B. Yeats and the poems he carried home from it.
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A Landscape Turned to Verse
Yeats spent summers as a boy with his grandparents in Sligo, and kept returning all his life. These four stops frame the country he called his "Land of Heart's Desire."
"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." — W. B. Yeats
Drumcliffe is where Yeats asked to be buried, under Benbulben's "bare head." Lissadell is the neo-classical house whose "light of evening" he never forgot. Glencar Waterfall rises up in The Stolen Child. The bronze figure on Hyde Bridge, where Stephen Street meets the Garavogue, stands in the town that first taught him the names of places.
Taken together, these four points trace the emotional geography of a poet's life — youth, myth, memory, and mortality — and they can be walked or driven in a single, unhurried afternoon.
The Route
All four stops on a single map, with driving lines and brief notes at each pin.
The Tour, Stop by Stop
Four points in Yeats Country, in suggested driving order.
Drumcliffe Church
"Cast a cold eye / On life, on death / Horseman, pass by."
Begin where Yeats' story ends. His grave lies in the churchyard at Drumcliffe, at the foot of Benbulben, beneath the epitaph he wrote for himself in one of his last poems. A high cross and the stump of a round tower remember the monastic settlement that stood here from the 6th century. The churchyard is quiet, free to enter, and open all year.
Lissadell House
"The light of evening, Lissadell, / Great windows open to the south, / Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful, one a gazelle."
A neo-classical house on the shore of Drumcliffe Bay, Lissadell was the childhood home of Eva Gore-Booth and her sister Constance — later Countess Markievicz, a leader of the 1916 Rising and the first woman elected to the House of Commons. The young Yeats visited in the 1890s; his elegy for the sisters is one of his best-loved poems.
House and gardens are open seasonally (typically June–August). Check opening hours before you travel.
Glencar Waterfall
"Where the wandering water gushes / From the hills above Glen-Car…" — The Stolen Child
A short, level walk from the car park leads to viewing platforms at the falls. On a windy day the water can blow back upwards in a white veil. The glen, with its wooded flanks and lake, is exactly the landscape the young Yeats drew on for The Stolen Child, and feels borrowed from the old faery tales he spent his life collecting.
SLIGO TOWN
Hyde Bridge & the Yeats Statue
"I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
End in Sligo town. On Stephen Street, near the Ulster Bank building and a few steps from Hyde Bridge over the Garavogue, a bronze figure of Yeats stands draped in the lines of his own verse, cast with the words of his poems pressed into the surface. A quiet place to sit with a book for twenty minutes before the drive home.
Why These Places Matter
These are not random landmarks. Taken in order they form a short arc — the kind a careful poet builds into a collection: Lissadell is youth, Glencar is myth, Drumcliffe is mortality, Sligo town is memory. Yeats drew from these four corners of his home county all his life, and he chose to be returned to one of them when he died.
You are walking through the room in which the poems were made. Bring a book of his verse, or not. The land itself is legible enough.
How to Travel the Route
Allow half a day. The driving itself is only about an hour; what takes time is standing in each place long enough for it to become something other than a photograph.
Start early. Drumcliffe is quietest before the coach tours arrive, and the light on Benbulben is finest before noon.
Check Lissadell's hours. The house is privately owned and open seasonally. The surrounding woodland walks are often accessible even when the house is not.
Bring footwear for Glencar. The path is short and paved, but spray off the falls keeps the boards wet in any weather.
Yeats wrote that "all things fall and are built again, and those that build them again are gay." These places have outlasted him, and will outlast us. Travel them slowly.
Curated by Andrew Dowds
This self-guided tour — the route, the stops, and the first draft of the notes — was put together by Andrew Dowds, a previous Taoiseach of the O'Dubhda Clan, who walked these roads on the Clan's behalf so that others could follow them.
We are grateful to him for the gift. The poems are Yeats's; the tour is Andrew's.
Continue Exploring
Other self-guided tours and places to visit in the O'Dubhda homelands.
A Note from the Clan
This tour is a living volunteer document. If you walk it and spot something out of date — a house that changed its hours, a path that closed, a line of Yeats we've slightly mis-quoted — please tell us.
We'd rather hear from you than get it wrong twice. Drop us a line.
