Site icon Folksy Travel by Bill Smale

Scintillating Sligo

admin

how do I remember scintillating Sligo? There is a song sung by the Clancy Brothers back in the 60s called “the Irish Rover”. They mentioned “the best Sligo rags. So when I saw the village on the map of course I had to stay here a night or two. It’s a cute little town where you will definitely want to visit especially if you come north of Galway.

This was on the wall in the restaurant “hooked” which had really nice food and very pleasant people working there. I highly recommend recommended it.
At the hotel, Riverside Hotel, which is very pleasant by the way, right on the river. Make sure you get a Riverview room, the Reception person recommended the fish and chips at this restaurant. The fish was really excellent, not soggy and you get too decent pieces and you can order an option to “chips” such as the salad which was recommended and was very tasty.
This was from my room which was of course a Riverview
This is kind of a very interesting old post office
The Sligo City Hall
The city Plaza
Below you can see one of the ancient burial sites. The entrance was closed so I took a photo from the distance.
This is one of the ancient burial sites
It’s a little difficult driving and taking photos at the same time but I was able to snap this one horse buggy going by deep in the countryside
Looking out at the farms and some residential area
I didn’t know at the time this was the place of Yeats. He is buried in Sligo and you will see the photos below
This is the Knocknarea mound and on top is the burial site of queen Maeve.
This mound on top of this hill is almost 6000 years old.
It’s a rough pathway up the hill
An explanation of the trail in the area
Beautiful views from the top of the hill
This actually reminds me of Champasak in Lao which is in the Pakse area
This is the view of the path while walking down
You can see the city of Sligo in the distance
Here is the mound and on top of that you can see the top of Queen Maeve’s tomb
Then I went down to Strandhill beach
On my way to Donnegal I saw a sign for “Yeats grave” so I decided to stop by.
A memorial to Yeats
There are some very old graves here which have been neglected and fallen into disrepair
The grave of William Butler Yeats
And then there is a memorial to the great disaster shipwreck the three ships of the Spanish Armada and thousands of sailors dead
The memorial to the shipwreck

there is a tale of the “black Irish” having black hair and therefore descended from the Spanish Armada sailors who landed or worship wrecked off of Ireland. Of course the Spanish did try a mass attack of Ireland in an effort to defeat the British. But it seems the term “black Irish“ was really a derogative term against the Irish. There were probably very very few survivors of the shipwreck who were able to stay hidden in Ireland. The English and the Irish rounded them up and the English executed most of them. So the term “black Irish“ does not refer to descendants of the Spanish Armada and in fact there are probably no descendants of the Spanish in Ireland.

Exit mobile version