Yeats renamed this wood before most people ever saw it. In ‘The Stolen Child’, written in 1886, the rocky highland that dips into Lough Gill is ‘Sleuth Wood’ – an anglicising of the Irish for slope, and his version of Slish. The real place is a working forest on the southern shore of the lake, planted with Norway spruce and Scots pine over the older oak, and it carries a waymarked walk down to the water and a boardwalk that most people come for.
The walk
From the car park at the north end, a gravel forest track drops towards the lake and follows the shore. It is waymarked and easy to read underfoot for the first stretch. At a fork about 1.6km in, the right-hand path climbs back to the car park to close a loop of roughly 4km – an hour at a gentle pace, with one steady rise rather than any real climb. Bear left instead and the track gives way to a timber boardwalk laid over the wet ground at the water’s edge.
The boardwalk is the part worth the drive. It carries you along the very edge of Lough Gill, low over reed and root, with the lake opening out on your left. Wear boots you don’t mind getting muddy: the shore is boggy by design, and the timber turns greasy after rain. On a still summer evening the midges find you here, so an early or breezy hour is kinder.
Yeats and the island
Slish Wood shaped two poems, not one. Yeats wrote in his memoir of setting out from Sligo about six one evening and passing a sleepless night in the wood, waiting to watch his island in the early dawn. That island is Innisfree, and the poem it gave him – ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, where ‘peace comes dropping slow’ – he actually wrote in London, homesick on Fleet Street, having heard a shop-window fountain and thought of lake water. He never lived on Innisfree. The plan to build a cabin there in imitation of Thoreau stayed a plan.
Here is the honest part. Innisfree is small, low and thickly wooded, and it lies off the far eastern end of the lake towards Dromahair, not close to Slish’s shore. From the boardwalk you look across the water towards it, but it reads as one dark islet among the twenty-odd that Lough Gill holds, and nothing about it announces the most quoted lines in Irish poetry. Come for the walk and the lake first. The Innisfree you carry to the water is mostly the one Yeats made.
Walking on
The boardwalk branch is also the start of a longer day. This section forms part of the Sligo Way, and from the fork you can carry on along the southern shore all the way to Dromahair, about 10km and three hours one way. Coillte runs a pilgrim route through here too, linking Slish with Ballygawley and Union woods. If you only have an hour, the loop back to the car park is the sensible turn.
Getting there
Slish Wood is signposted off the R287. From Sligo town, take the N4 south for about 4km, then the R287 towards Ballintogher; the entrance is roughly 5km along on the left. The Coillte car park at the trailhead is free, with a picnic area but no shop, café or toilets – bring what you need.
For more of the same lake, Dooney Rock sits a few minutes west along the southern shore, with its own short loop and a rock Yeats gave a fiddler in another poem. Hazelwood Forest faces you from the northern side, and Parke’s Castle stands on the Leitrim shore near the eastern end, closest of all to Innisfree itself.
If the poem is really why you came, drive on round to the Innisfree viewing point near the eastern shore, where the island sits square in front of you across a narrower stretch of water. From Slish you get the better walk; from there you get the better view.