Wanderung · Co. Sligo
A 526 m table mountain above the Sligo country, with a flat top and a single sheer face — the mountain Yeats asked to be buried beneath, and the signature walk of the county.
Benbulbin (526 m) is a table mountain in the Dartry range, the best-known peak of what is called Yeats country: a steep-sided, flat-topped massif, formed as a nunatak during the last ice age, with the whole of the Sligo country spread below it. It is the mountain that gave its name to Yeats’s poem “Under Ben Bulben”, and the flat top and the single great face are the shape the poem, and every photograph, is trying to hold.
The standard walk is from Strandhill: a steady climb out of the village, across the open ground below the face, and up to the top, where the view runs the length of the coast — Sligo Bay to one side, the open Atlantic to the other. The walk is a full day from the village, and the flat top is a long walk in itself; the famous Pulpit, the rock outcrop on the edge of the top, is the photograph most people are after.
The Irish name is Binn Ghulbain — binn means peak, and ghulbain may mean beak or jaw, or refer to Conall Gulban, a son of Niall of the Nine Hostages, who is associated with the mountain. The stone is Carboniferous limestone over mudstone, laid down in a shallow sea some 345–330 million years ago, and the shape itself was cut by glaciers moving from northeast to southwest during the last ice age. The mountain is a designated County Geological Site of Sligo County Council — the geology is part of what is being looked at, not just the view.
The mountain is open ground, and the weather on the top can be a long way from the weather in the village; in a storm the face and the top are closed country. The walk is easy on a good day and serious on a bad one, and the difference is the mountain itself.
Übernachten
A base within the hour of the start makes the walk a choice rather than a compromise.
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A headland on the north coast of Sligo Bay and one of the best-known surf spots in Ireland — a place we describe here without a precise map, because the headland and its dunes are fragile and the land is not all public.