The mountain
Ben Bulben, in Irish Binn Ghulbain and also spelt Benbulbin, is part of the Dartry Mountains in the north of County Sligo. It rises to 526 metres. Its shape, a long table top with steep, ribbed sides, comes from its rock: layers of limestone laid down in a shallow sea in the Carboniferous period, some 330 million years ago, over softer shale on the lower slopes. Ice in the last Ice Age cut the sides back to the cliffs seen today.
The high plateau carries Arctic-alpine plants that are rare in Ireland, some found nowhere else in the country, such as fringed sandwort. Choughs, hares and foxes live on the mountain, which is a Special Area of Conservation.
Legend and history
Ben Bulben is a place of the old stories. In the Fenian tale of Diarmuid and Gráinne, it is on Ben Bulben that Diarmuid, who had fled with Gráinne from Fionn mac Cumhaill, is killed by a boar during a hunt. Fionn could have healed him with water carried in his hands, and twice let it slip through his fingers.
The plain below is held to be the site of the battle of Cúl Dreimhne in the sixth century, linked in tradition with St Columba and a dispute over a copied book of psalms. Columba's monastery at Drumcliffe stood at the mountain's foot.
Yeats and Ben Bulben
Yeats spent childhood summers in Sligo with his Pollexfen grandparents, and Ben Bulben was the mountain on his skyline. He came back to it in poems written far from Sligo. In "The Tower", published in the book of that name in 1928, the ageing poet remembers a boyhood when, fishing "with rod and fly", he "climbed Ben Bulben's back" and had the whole summer day to spend.
In "Towards Break of Day" he dreams of "a waterfall / Upon Ben Bulben side" that his childhood loved, and knows that if he reached it he would touch only stone and water. In "On a Political Prisoner" he remembers Constance Gore-Booth of Lissadell, later Countess Markievicz, riding "Under Ben Bulben to the meet", and sets the young horsewoman against the political prisoner she became.
The mountain gave its name to "Under Ben Bulben", written in 1938 and published in 1939, after his death. It ends with directions for his own grave in the churchyard at Drumcliffe, where he was reburied in 1948.
Visiting today
Ben Bulben can be seen from much of north Sligo, and one of the best views is from Drumcliffe churchyard, beside the N15 road north of Sligo town. Coillte's Gortarowey forest recreation area lies at its foot, near Drumcliffe. The Benbulben forest walk there is a 5.5 km loop on forest tracks, with views over Sligo and Donegal bays and past an early medieval stone ringfort; it does not go to the summit.
The top is most easily reached from the south, where the slopes are gentler. The northern cliffs are dangerous, and much of the mountain is farmland, so walkers going higher should be well prepared, keep away from the edges, and respect the land they cross.
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