Experience the best of Sligo

Sligo grew up where the Garavogue River runs from Lough Gill into Sligo Bay, and the town keeps a compact centre of stone bridges, church spires and shopfronts. The ruins of Sligo Abbey, a Dominican friary founded in the thirteenth century, stand among the streets. The poet W. B. Yeats spent childhood summers in the county, and Ben Bulben, the flat-topped limestone ridge to the north, appears in many of his poems.

Yeats is buried in the churchyard at Drumcliffe, beneath Ben Bulben, and the Lake Isle of Innisfree he wrote about lies in Lough Gill. West of town, Carrowmore holds one of Ireland's largest groups of Stone Age tombs, while a great cairn said to mark the grave of Queen Maeve crowns Knocknarea mountain. Strandhill and Rosses Point offer surf and sandy bays, and Glencar Lough has a waterfall in a wooded glen.

The sea supplies much of the local food, with oysters, mussels and smoked fish on many menus, and the seaweed baths at Strandhill are a long-standing coastal custom. Evenings in the pubs often bring traditional music. The Atlantic keeps the climate mild and changeable, with the best light on the mountains in late spring and early summer.