Landmark · Co. Sligo
The village on the N15 eight km north of Sligo where W. B. Yeats is buried in the churchyard of St. Columba’s, at the foot of Benbulbin, under an epitaph of his own writing.
Drumcliff (Irish: Droim Chliabh, “the ridge of the baskets”) is best known for one grave: that of W. B. Yeats, in the churchyard of St. Columba’s Church of Ireland. Yeats died in France in 1939 and his body was brought back to Sligo in 1948 and buried here, as he had asked in the poem “Under Ben Bulben” — no marble, no conventional phrases. The headstone carries his own epitaph: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!” The mountain that gives the poem its name fills the background of the churchyard.
The churchyard is old in its own right: a round tower and a Celtic high cross stand with the church, and the site is that of a sixth-century monastery. Yeats’s own family had been in the parish for generations — his great-grandfather John Yeats was Church of Ireland rector of Drumcliff from 1805, and the rectory he lived in still stands close to the church. A small coffee and craft shop operates in the churchyard.
Adjacent to the churchyard is a small military cemetery, where those who died in the 1916 rising in Sligo are buried — the place where the poet and the men he wrote about come together.
The village is small and the visit is short — the churchyard, the monument, the view of Benbulbin — but it is the natural centre of the Yeats country circuit, and the N15 puts Sligo town ten minutes to the south and the Lough Gill country to the west.
Where to stay
A base within ten minutes of Drumcliff makes the whole circuit — Benbulbin, the lough, the coast — a day trip.
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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.