Elsien's Traveblogue

It was a lovely bog though.

The next day we went down to Sligo - Yeats country. We stopped for lunch in Donegal Town - cute and very small, with a very small castle, then to Lissadell House where W.B. Yeats used to spend time with the Gore-Booth sisters. The youngest was a writer and philosopher, the older became Countess Constance Markiewicz, a revolutionary who played a significant part in the Easter Rising (1916), was taken prisoner and would have been shot at dawn if she hadn't been a woman (!). Was freed later, became the first woman MP at Westminster, never took up the seat but became an Irish MP instead. Yeats poems: To a political prisoner and one dedicated to the sisters. Impressive country house and even more impressive gardens. J. stole sunflower seeds, which hopefully will sprout on the Brussels' balcony.

We circled round the mountain called Ben Bulben, see Yeats's last poems, 'Under Ben Bulben', in which he wrote his own epitaph which we saw at Drumcliff Church, where he is buried.

Of course we had to go to the Lake Isle of Inisfree, probably the most famous poem!

After that the fabulous Donegal coast: white sand beaches, cliffs, dunes, rocks, wild waves, lighthouses .... Lots of little walks between showers!