Drumcliffe, County Sligo

About eight kilometres north of Sligo Town, on a low gravel ridge between the Mountain of Ben Bulben and Drumcliffe Bay is a village by the name of Drumcliffe. The original name was Cnoc na Teagh and is a possible location of the settlement named Nagnata as shown on Claudius Ptolemy’s map of Ireland. This village has a rich history.

At the edge of the village is the local church, St Columba’s Church of Ireland. A number of famous people are buried there. It also has some extremely old burial plots that have the celtic cross as headstones.

One of Drumcliffe’s more recent residents was W.B. Yeats. William Butler Yeats was born in 1865 in Sandymount, Ireland, and, because his paternal grandmother was from County Sligo, spent a great deal of time in the county as a child. One of the things that our bus driver had said about Yeats was that he asked Maud Gonne to marry him three times but she said no every time. Years later, there was a proposition of marriage from her daughter which he declined.

W.B. Yeats died in 1939 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. In 1948, his remains were brought back to Drumcliffe and reinterred in the cemetery at this church. Many people go to the cemetery to visit his grave.