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Céad Míle Fáilte

“A Hundred Thousand Welcomes!”

Fernlea is situated in countryside townland of Kiltycahill, just outside the County Town of Sligo. It consists of three large fields that run down to the beautiful, enigmatic Lough Gill and faces the wonderous mountains of Slieve Deane. On one side is the Hazelwood Demense, Half Moon Bay and the ancient area of Annagh Point. Whilst on the other side the Lough runs the neighbouring county of Leitrim.

Our Home Alongside Picturesque

Lough Gill in Sligo County

W.B Yeats

Lough Gill

Fernlea

Fernlea

Lisadell House

Sligo Abbey

Fernlea Latest Views

Sligo Races

Our Home Alongside Picturesque Lough Gill

(All the above photos taken from our back garden)

* Click on photos below for more details on the subjects

A picturesque lough in which the lake isle of Innisfree is located, made famous by W.B. Yeats who wrote the poem feeling homesick for Ireland and imagined the sound of the water at Innisfree. Also on the banks of Lough Gill from Dooney Rock you can see all of the lough. Lough Gill (or Loch Gile in Irish) is a lake mainly situated in County Sligo, but partly in County Leitrim, in the Republic of Ireland. It is about 8 km (5 miles) long and 2 km (1 mile) wide and drains into the River Garavogue near Sligo Town. The picturesque lake is surrounded by wooded hills and is popular with birdwatchers. It is overlooked by the fortified manor house, Parke's Castle. The present castle was built in the 1600s by Captain Robert Parke on the site of the former stronghold of the O'Rourke (Uí Ruairc) clan. The Uí Ruairc's ruled the area from about the 7th century (they were descended from Sean Ferghal O Ruairc, King of Connacht around 952) up to the time of Oliver Cromwell. The lake contains about 20 small islands, including the romantic Lake Isle of Innisfree made famous in a poem by William Butler Yeats.

County Sligo

Inspiration for William Butler Yeats
1865-1939

County Sligo's beautiful scenery was an inspiration for Yeats, who is buried at Drumcliffe Churchyard, under loaf-shaped Benbulben Mountain. The lakes of Sligo, with their still waters and wooded islands, are truly spectacular, and form a striking contrast to the county's rugged uplands. The imposing Neolithic cairn on the summit of Knocknarae, known locally as Queen Maeve's grave, is a striking landmark. At Carrowmore, you'll find the largest Megalithic cemetery in Ireland. (More)

Sligo Town, County Sligo

Known affectionately as the Yeat's Country, County Sligo lies in the Connacht province in the west of Republic of Ireland. The countryside of Sligo offers mountains, beaches and lakes. The capital of County Sligo is an attractive town with good bars and restaurants, theatres, art galleries and delicatessens. Sligo is the largest town in the north-west, with a heritage going back 6,000 years. Its name literally translates as 'the place of shells' - the town's prehistoric residents had a huge appetite for shellfish, and the remains of the unfortunate crustaceans can be found buried all over the area. Sligo town makes a good base for a range of activities - horse riding, golfing, walking, cycling, fishing and water sports are all very popular.

Lough Gill and Knocknarea covered in mist
 
(above) Lough Gill (below) Benbulben

William Butler Yeats

Writer, dramatist, founder of the Abbey Theatre, and the greatest modern poet writing in English. William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 at 5 Sandymount Avenue, Dublin. He was the son of John Butler Yeats, a barrister who became a fine (though financially unsuccessful) portrait painter and Susan Pollexfen, the daughter of a wealthy Sligo merchant family. Shortly after his birth the family moved to London, where his father thought he might have more success. Yeats went to the Godolphin School, Hammersmith, but spent delightful holidays in Sligo with his grandparents. When the family returned to Dublin in 1880 he attended Erasmus Smith High School, in Harcourt Street, Dublin. His father wished him to go to Trinity College, following the family tradition, but he refused: he feared he would not meet the entrance requirements. Instead he studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in 1884–5, and then in 1886 at the Royal Hibernian Academy.

At the Metropolitan he became friendly with the mystic and poet George Russell and a group of others interested in the occult. At the Contemporary Club, where there was a ferment of ideas and lively debate, he met Douglas Hyde, Stephen Gwynn, John O’Leary, Michael Davitt and other important figures. From an early age he had been writing poetry and plays in imitation of Shelley and Spenser, and about 1886 he decided to abandon art and devote himself to writing.

Yeats published his first lyrics in the Dublin University Review in 1885. He worked for some time as literary correspondent for American newspapers, including the Boston Pilot. His interest in Irish myth and his commitment to the cause of Irish national identity stemmed mainly from living in the West of Ireland and from his contact with the Fenian, John O’Leary. He joined the Blavatsky London Lodge of the Theosophical Society (1887) and the Order of the Golden Dawn (1890). Yeats’s experiments with the occult were as much a matter of poetic imagination as a pursuit of the supernatural. He met most of the poets of his generation at the Rhymers’ Club, which he helped found. In 1891 he helped establish the Irish Literary Society of London. The following year, in Dublin, he joined with John O’Leary in founding the National Literary Society to publicise the literature, folklore, and legends of Ireland. In 1888 he had published Fairy and folk tales of the Irish peasantry and his Irish fairy tales appeared in 1892. In 1889 he published The Wanderings of Oisin, a long, highly imaginative poem based on Irish mythology, and in 1892 The Countess Cathleen, his first poetic play. His volume of folk stories, The Celtic Twilight, appeared in 1893. In 1895 he edited A Book of Irish Verse and published Poems. Three collections of poems appeared in 1897: The Secret Rose, The Tables of the Law, and The Adoration of the Magi.

Yeats first met the love of his life, Maud Gonne, in 1889. For him she symbolised the spirit of tragic beauty and Irish nationalism. He proposed marriage to her in 1891 but was rejected. He was impressed by her revolutionary activities and she was the subject of many of his love poems. His long-sustained passion for her was to have enormous consequences for his politics and his poetry. When he later wrote of nationalist politics in his Autobiographies as ‘the fixed ideas of some hysterical woman, a part of the mind turned into stone’, he had her in mind. He became active in advanced nationalist politics after the Parnellite split (1890) and tried to mobilise nationalist literary groups as a basis for an Irish artistic revival. He joined the IRB playing a prominent part in the celebrations of the centenary of the 1798 Rising.

In 1896 he met Lady Augusta Gregory, a talented and capable woman whose house at Coole Park, Co Galway, offered a warm welcome to writers and artists. She encouraged him and helped him establish the Irish Literary Theatre. George Moore and Edward Martyn (who had introduced Yeats to Lady Gregory) joined with Yeats as the directors of the Irish Literary Theatre Society. It had its first performance, Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, in 1899 and there was a great lot of controversy over it. In 1902 Maud Gonne played the title role in Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan: it was a dramatic triumph. He was still deeply in love with her, but she rejected him again and to his horror married Major John McBride in 1903.

Collaboration with Frank and William Fay led to the founding of the Irish National Theatre, Yeats and Lady Gregory being co-directors. After the turn of the century he abandoned active politics and devoted himself to writing. Annie Horniman, a wealthy Englishwoman from Manchester, bought the Mechanics’ Institute in Abbey St, Dublin, for the Irish Theatre in 1904 and gave it a subsidy for some years. On the opening night, 27 December 1904, the Abbey Players presented a treble bill, On Baile’s Strand and Cathleen Ni Houlihan by Yeats and Spreading the News by Lady Gregory. It produced a new Yeats play nearly every year. In 1906, under a new constitution, Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge were appointed directors. Yeats remained a director until his death. The founding of the Abbey, which was in his own words ‘a small dingy and impecunious theatre’, marked the launching of a dramatic movement that made Dublin an important literary capital in the first quarter of the century. Yeats took a firm stand against clerics and nationalists, who quarrelled over the political and moral role of the theatre.

Yeats was, above all, famous as a great poet. An American lecture tour (1903–4) helped establish his reputation. In 1913 he received a Civil List pension of £150 a year, but he refused a knighthood in 1915. A year later he proposed again to Maud Gonne, now a widow since the execution of her husband John MacBride, for his part in the Rising. She refused yet again. His greatest achievement in poetry came with the publication of four volumes between 1919 and 1933. The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), and the Winding Stair (1933). Several of his poems were written in honour of the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising, some of whom had been fellow-workers in the literary movement.

In 1917 Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees (she was 26 and he was 52). Marriage changed his life and Georgie influenced his poetry. In A Vision (1925), a piece full of symbolism, he set out his ideas on mankind and art, and this was the framework of later poems. Two children were born, Anne in 1919, and Michael in 1921. He bought Thoor Ballylee, a small derelict tower-house in Co. Galway, close to Lady Gregory’s home, and 82 Merrion Square, a fine Georgian house in Dublin in 1922.

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by

 

He was made a Senator of the Irish Free State by President Cosgrave and he played an active role in the Senate. He chaired the committee on the design of the new coinage. Later he made a remarkable contribution to the debate on divorce, including a noble defence of the Irish Protestant tradition with which he strongly identified: ‘We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift and Parnell. We have created the most of the modern literature of this county’. He received honorary degrees from Queen’s University College Belfast and University College Dublin. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1932 he co-founded with George Bernard Shaw the Irish Academy of Letters, for the promotion of creative writing in Ireland.

In the mid-twenties, his health began to fail. On medical advice he spent many winters in Italy and France from 1927 on. One of his last major literary undertakings was his editorship of the controversial Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (1936). Despite age and ill-health, his output was remarkable, especially his powerful New Poems (1938) and Last Poems (1938–9). Late in the winter of 1938 he left Ireland for the Riviera in failing health. He died at Roquebrune, Cap Martin, in the south of France on the 28 January 1939. His remains were brought back to Ireland in 1948 and re-interred in the churchyard of his grandfather’s parish at Drumcliff, Co. Sligo. His headstone bears his own cryptic epitaph (left). The High Cross at Drumcliff Church where Yeats now lies in the graveyard there.

 

Benbulben

Ireland's most distinctive mountain and known in some parts as Ireland's version of Table Mountain. It is the result from the different responses to erosion of the limestone and shale of which the mountain is formed. A hard and resistant limestone forms the upper cliffs and precipices. Many legends and tales have been woven round the almost magical mountain that is Benbulben. Mysterious shady valleys dominate the landscape in this upland alpine-like region. You can easily see how this brooding mountain, which rises so steeply from the ground below, could conjure up tales of enchanted maidens, warriors and spells. This beautiful Irish and Sligo landmark can be seen from the rear of our fields and is truly magnificent in its splendour.

Lough Gill (From The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland)

"The chief object of attraction in the neighbourhood of Sligo, is Loch Gilly; a lake which is not sufficiently known to enjoy the reputation it deserves. I hired a boat at Sligo, and ascended the river, through a succession of beautiful scenery, to the domain of Hazlewood, the property of Mr. Wynn. This is a very lovely spot; the views of the lake, from a hundred points, are enchanting; and, in the disposition of lawn, wood, and shrubbery, taste and art have taken ample advantage of the gifts of nature. Finer evergreens I never saw in the most southern countries. The laurels and bays--grown into groat trees--rivalled, if they did not surpass, those of Woodstock or Curraghmore; and here I again found the arbutus, not, indeed, quite equal in its perfections to the arbutus of Killarney, but not greatly its inferior; and giving to the scenery all that advantage of colouring, which is the boast of Killarney. The timber, too, on this domain is equal to almost any I have seen; and I have often found myself pausing before some magnificent ash, oak, elm, or lime, throwing its deep shade across the green amphitheatre, which it seemed to have made for itself. "But I must not forget Loch Gilly, which indeed it would be difficult to do. The domain of Hazlewood extends over that part of the banks of the river where it widens into the lake, and forms the first promontory. I embarked on the lake on the other side. Loch Gilly is about eight miles long, and from one to two broad, and in the character of beauty, will bear a comparison with any lake in Ireland. Its scenery is not stupendous--scarcely even anywhere bold; but it is 'beautiful exceedingly.' Its boundaries are not mountains, but hills of sufficient elevation to form apicturesque and striking outline. The hill-sides, which in some places rise abruptly from the water, and which, in others, slope more gently, are covered to a considerable elevation with wood; and the lake is adorned with twenty-three islands, almost every one of them finely wooded. Here, too, as well as on Hazlewood domain, I found that the arbutus is not confined to Killarney. The extent of Loch Gilly is highly favourable to its beauty. The eye embraces at once its whole length and breadth; the whole circumference of its shores ;

 

all their varieties and contrasts at once; all its islands. One charm is not losin the contemplation of another, as in a greater lake: the whole is seen at once and enjoyed. I remained many hours on Loch Gilly, rowing here and there, or not moving at all; landing on its islands, two of which--Church Island and Cottage Island--are full of beauty; putting ashore in little coves and inlets: and visiting a holy well, two or three hundred yards from the banks, where I saw eleven devotees, four of whom went from station to station on their knees. I also visited a house of public resort near the lake, which the citizens of Sligo frequent on Sundays: and tasted their favourite beverage, called scolteen; composed of the following elegant ingredients--whiskey, eggs, sugar, butter, caraway-seeds, and beer."

W.B Yeats

Lough Gill

Fernlea

Fernlea

Lisadell House

Sligo Abbey

Fernlea Latest Views

Sligo Races

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

W.B Yeats

Lough Gill

Fernlea

Fernlea

Lisadell House

Sligo Abbey

Fernlea

Sligo Races

 

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