Sligo, Ireland

We drove into Sligo in the evening. We’d stopped for  a superb dinner at the Harbour Restaurant in Donegal.  The scenery on the way down was worth the road trip.  A great mountain ridge rose to the left of us, the famed Benbulben.

To the right we could see ragged cliffs and Atlantic  ocean.

We entered Sligo in the evening crossing the Harbour Estuary by the Hughes bridge.   River Garavogue carries on from here. That night we saw the Sligo Famine Memorial, a grieving family sculpture by Fred Conton.   It was erected in 1997 to mark the anniversary of “Black ’47”. More than 2000 famine victims were buried in the famine Graveyard of Sligo’s St. John’s Hospital.  More than 30,000 people left Sligo for new lives abroad between 1847 and 1851.
 We stayed in the Sligo City Hotel, thankful for their hospitality.  That evening, with all the shops closed, Laura and I walked about the silent streets of Sligo, liking it very much.  The next day we saw the bronze Yeats sculpture by Rohan Gillepsie.  It was unveiled by his son, Michael, to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Yeat’s death.
 
The Sligo Abbey was founded in the 13th Century.




When we left Sligo, the next morning we drove back the few km up to Drumcliffe Church, the ancient monastery founded by St. Columcille, Drumcliffe Cross and the W.B. Yeats Grave.  We returned to Galway and drove the few km from there to the Carrymore Megalithic Cemetery, dating from 3500 B.C

The Drumcliffe Cross, Ireland

The monastery at Drumcliffe a 8 km north of Sligo is where W.B. Yeats grave is, but it’s also famous for the Drumcliffe Cross. The monastery was founded by St. Columba,(St. Columcille).  There is a church but a young man was hawking Keats wares there.  I was   reminded of Jesus who threw  the money lenders out,of the temple.  There seems to be too much business in the sanctuary and not enough prayer and meditation.  The Drumcliffe Cross though was astonishing with truly amazing detail of the scriptural carvings.  They were painted in their day, like the sculptures on the Acropolis.  We see these minimalist stone remains and forget so easily that they were once brightly coloured, not  unlike Catholic sculptures of our day.
“Beloved to my heart in also in the west
Drumcliffe, at Culcinne’s strand”
is from a poem attributed to St. Columba. Laura and I walked along the river down from the Round Tower.  It was a lovely location. Sacred. Peaceful. We imagined monks in ancient times meditatively walking here. 
 

W.B. Yeats, Ireland

I loved Yeats as a young man.  I was a young man. He was eternal.  Described as the “Last Romantic”.  He was a poet of Irish legend, then political poet, but too conservative for his Suffragette Maude Maud Gonne  He was a mystic who wanted a Celtic mystic club. One of the Anglo Irish Ascendancy, a protestant Irishman, he stood against the English dominance.  In Draperstown we saw Yeats written on the walls. He was in Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland.  He haunted Dublin. Wherever we turned he was there.  Sometimes there were even statues of him. Quotations of his poems adorned the sides of vans. In the Long Hall at Trinity we saw his signed “Fiddler of Dooney”.  To this day he is that much loved.
The Coming of Wisdom With Time, by W.B. Yeats
   Though leaves are many, the root is one;
   Through all the lying days of my youth
    I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun,
    Now I may wither into the truth.

We visited his grave at Drumcliffe. He’d been happy in the Sligo area, the mountains, sea and wild. It was good to re visit the Yeats of my youth. I like him even more  now that I am an older man.  

Carrymore Megalithic Graveyards and Virgins, Ireland

We came across the sign for these leaving Sligo on the way to Galway. They were only 15 minutes off the main road.  I was really glad we made the effort to see them.  Nothing so humbling as to walk among the stones of prehistoric man, laid out 3500 BC.
It was raining while we walked about the field.  It really made us  feel like we were in Ireland.  We’d consistently had sunshine.  Yet the locals said, and the glorious green of grass spoke of the constant rain through winter and this time of year in spring.  Now we were truly experiencing the drizzle I remembered from London.  Not a downpour like one gets on the West Coast of Canada but this pleasant wet rain with a hefty breeze.  The sheep with lanolin in their fur were perfectly adapted to this.  It was the weather I’d read about in James Joyce. And here we were walking over the ‘moors’.  I think moors is a Scottish term but it felt like that.
We had a map from the central office of the Carrymore Megalithic site which we’d got when we paid admission. It told us that a pile of rocks which we’d have thought nothing of was indeed a grave and with the map we could see what they meant. Like when a person points out a dog or a face in a cloud formation. There was that aha moment then.  Which was fun in itself. The big structures were obviously self evident. And quite uncanny.  Making the whole idea of space ships and aliens visiting thousands of years ago seem more  reasonable as an explanation than ancestral gravesides. Not that Laura and I had anything against graveyards.  We were becoming graveyard connoisseurs with our various adventures in ancestry.
By any standard this was a most splendid graveyard, if it was a graveyard.  It might have been  a bunch of rocks in a circle with a fire and a Monty Python Flintsone character in the raised bit in the middle doing jokes,  beating on skins, or haranguing the tribe that the world was going to end,  or climate was going to change. Alternatively maybe people decided to clear a field for a dance or crops and decided to pile all the stones in the centre just for the fun of it.  Thousands of PHD thesis had been written about this very idea or some thing similar. There were academic factions who thought it was part of a Stone Henge franchise.  Mostly since agriculture and planting times were so important it was thought to be a big calendar astronomically oriented to the stars, because prehistoric folk were poor and couldn’t afford iPhone calendars.  Academic food fights broke out routinely in university cafeterias between competing factions.
Alternatively some really short smart guy who wanted to be taller than everyone else, because he’d been bullied as a child, somehow convinced everyone to make him a pedestal. Maybe he  scared them and said  that the dinosaurs were extinct and the mammoths had moved on because they masturbated. He was probably telling them to stay away from the sheep too. Don’t eat bacon.  Don’t wear lipstick.  Don’t paint their bodies blue like the Scots. Irish don’t do that sort of thing.
In the biggest mound they had an inner circle with a rock table. The priests probably had a party there and after  they sacrificed virgins, ate them, or got into necrophilia.   Pre Christian pagan priests got up to whatever they wanted to because there wasn’t any ‘oversight’.  Whistle blowers were still at the bag pipe stage.   There’s little known a bout the Druids except they did have sacrifices like the Mayans.  For all the bad press Christians and Jews get they stopped child sacrifice.
That the  map said this was where some King was laid to rest could be just a way for this heritage site to keep  from getting a restricted ‘adult’ rating.  They probably aren’t telling you everything they know.    No one really knows why the Druids were so secretive. Transparency still isn’t popular with the leadership.
Laura and I had a bit of laughter walking about in the rain looking at the rocks.  There was obviously  a bit of awe thrown in.  Maybe that’s why I was joking.  Laura and I were laughing. But the place was kind of spooky  too.  The place could give one that feeling someone was watching.  Whoever or whatever they were,  they’d  been doing it for a very long time.
Eventually Laura and I stood silent in this sacred place.