Things to do
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Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery
The largest megalithic cemetery in Ireland and among the oldest in Europe, with about thirty surviving tombs of the original sixty, in use from about 3700 BC. It is an OPW site with a guide and it looks straight up at Knocknarea.
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Glencar Waterfall
A fifteen-metre fall in a wooded glen east of Drumcliffe, and the water Yeats meant in The Stolen Child. It is a five-minute walk from the car park on a made path.
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Aughris Head
A low cliff walk on a headland west of Sligo town with a seabird colony, a holy well and a pub on the beach at the start. The loop is about five kilometres and is usually empty.
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Benbulben
A limestone table of five hundred and twenty-six metres with sheer northern gullies, cut into its shape by the ice that came down from the north-west. The forest walk loop at Gortarowey gets under the face and the summit is reached from the southern flank.
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Drumcliffe
The churchyard under Benbulben where Yeats is buried beneath his own epitaph, on the site of a monastery founded by Saint Columba with a round tower stump and a tenth-century high cross. It is eight kilometres north of the town on the N15.
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Knocknarea
A limestone hill of three hundred and twenty-seven metres carrying Queen Maeve's Cairn, a neolithic mound ten metres high that has never been excavated. Walkers are asked not to climb the cairn itself, and the ascent from Strandhill takes about an hour.
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Mullaghmore Head
A headland with Classiebawn Castle on the skyline and a reef offshore that throws up waves of over fifteen metres in the right winter swell, surfed by tow-in crews. Mountbatten was killed by a bomb on a boat off this harbour in 1979.