Most of Sligo’s visitors follow the same short list: Benbulben, Knocknarea, Yeats’s grave at Drumcliffe, a walk on Strandhill or Rosses Point. All of it earns the attention. But the county keeps its quieter half to the west and south of Sligo town, in surf villages, fiddle country and the wooded south shore of Lough Gill, and you can string a day or two of it together without ever joining a queue. Here are seven of the best, roughly west to south, with the one to prioritise flagged as we go.
1. Easkey, the surfers’ village
Easkey (or Easky – both spellings are on the signs) is a small village on the north Sligo coast that surfers have known about for decades. The reef break off the shore works year-round and holds a swell when softer beach breaks have gone flat, which is why you’ll see wetsuits in the water here in January. This is cold-water, rocky-bottom surfing, not a beginners’ beach, so watch from the pier before you paddle out.
Two things to find on land. The ruined O’Dowd tower house sits right by the water at the pier, a reminder of the family that held this coast for centuries. And a couple of kilometres west is the Split Rock, a house-sized glacial erratic cleaved in two, which the folklore credits to Finn McCool losing a throwing contest with a rival giant. The story goes that if you pass through the split three times the rock will close on you. Down at the shore, Poll Gorm – the ‘blue hole’ – is a natural rock pool the locals swim in on a calm day.
If you only stop at one place on this page, and you want the sea, make it here. Come with the tide dropping and the light low. Enniscrone and its long strand are 15 minutes down the coast if you’d rather a beach you can walk on.
2. Aughris Head
Round the bay from Easkey, Aughris Head has the highest sea cliffs in the county – 30 metres of them – and a loop walk that most people finish in an hour. The roughly 4km circuit ties together a cliff-edge ring fort, a concrete World War II lookout post from Ireland’s neutral coast-watching chain, and St Patrick’s Holy Well, before dropping you back at the thatched Beach Bar on the sand. The walk isn’t formally waymarked, but you can’t lose it: keep the sea on one side and follow the edge.
The drops are steep and unguarded, so it’s no place for a standard pushchair or for small children off the lead of your attention. Read more on Aughris Head before you go. If time is short, walk out from the Beach Bar as far as the lookout and turn back – that stretch is the best of it.
3. Gurteen and the pink fiddle museum
South Sligo is fiddle country, and Gurteen is its centre. The Coleman Heritage Centre – a bright pink building with a round tower, hard to miss on the road – remembers Michael Coleman, the Killavil fiddler born nearby in 1891 whose 78rpm records, cut in New York in the 1920s, reached back across the Atlantic and set the template for how Sligo-style fiddle is played to this day. Emigrants who never came home shaped the music of the parish they’d left.
The centre tells that story with recordings and instruments, and it’s a working hub for the living tradition rather than a set of glass cases. Time a visit for a session if you can, and note the wider south Sligo music scene builds to the South Sligo Summer School in July, when the area fills with players.
4. Coolaney and the mountain-bike trails
Coolaney is a small village at the foot of the Ox Mountains, a tidy street of painted fronts that most people drive straight through. The reason to stop now sits in the forest above it: a purpose-built mountain-bike trail centre, with graded loops winding through the conifers for everyone from families on the green routes to riders who want a rockier line.
Bring your own bike, check the trail grades before you set off, and don’t expect a full resort’s worth of facilities at the trailhead. The village itself is the place for a coffee afterwards.
5. Riverstown
Riverstown, in the south-east of the county, is a one-street village worth the detour for its folk park, where a collection of everyday farm and household objects fills in what rural south Sligo life actually looked like a century ago – the kind of small local museum that keeps a place’s memory better than any big institution. The Georgian country house of Coopershill sits nearby, still run by the same family.
It’s a short village and an honest one – an hour covers it. Check opening times before you drive out, because the folk park keeps seasonal hours.
6. Ballisodare and its falls
Seven kilometres south of Sligo town, Ballysadare (you’ll see it written Ballisodare too) sits where the Owenmore River drops 5 to 7 metres over its falls into a tidal bay. The rapids below the bridge make one of Ireland’s better-known white-water runs, about two kilometres of it down to the sea, and the spring salmon start pushing up through the pools at the base of the falls from April. A paved walkway gives you the falls in safety.
One flat warning if you’re in a boat: there’s a cave on river-right near the base of the falls that is a genuine hazard, and the hydraulics change with the tide. Scout it, don’t run it blind. Above the falls stands St Féichín’s early church, one of the better-preserved early Christian stone churches in the country.
7. Slish Wood, the quiet shore of Lough Gill
Everyone photographs Lough Gill from Dooney Rock or takes the boat out towards Innisfree. Fewer people cross to the wooded south shore and Slish Wood, which is a pity, because this is the ‘Sleuth Wood in the lake’ of Yeats’s ‘The Stolen Child’ – ‘Where dips the rocky highland / Of Sleuth Wood in the lake’. The forest path runs level along the water through oak and holly, with the lake and its islands framed between the trunks.
It’s the calmest stop on this list and the best one to end on. See the Lough Gill page for the Dooney Rock climb and the Rose of Innisfree boat if you want the famous views as well. For the poem, come at dusk, when the far shore goes dark and you can see exactly what Yeats was hearing.
