Under Ben Bulben

We started the day with a bike ride up onto the ridge above Cromleagh Lodge, taking in sights you miss while driving. I didn't bring a camera, so I can't share these sights, however I recall one observation (I'm writing a week later due to a range of tecnical difficulties while traveling).

The wide gates that open into fields in the south are one of the things I notice changed from the north. They are an odd amalgam of any of the following: pallets, wodden fence posts, nylon baling twine, barbed wire, metal bars, and barrels. The north has a reputation for farms that are almost preposterously tidy (with industrial strength metal gates), while the farms in the south are a bit more like, well, farms.

We stopped at an art gallery near the lodge after the bike ride. The art gallery also had a clothes shop, beauty salon, and music shop. David bought a fiddle and then we headed north to Sligo, turning west at Ballysadare and driving along the south side of Sligo Bay, with Ben Bulben visible on the north side. Fellow English majors may know that Yeats is buried under Ben Bulben and, in his declining years, he wrote a poem that included his epitaph. Here are the final two stanzas:

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

We stopped at a point jutting into Sligo Bay for lunch:

Then through the very cute town of Ballina to the even cuter town of Westport.

Where we partook of some trad music (as in traditional Irish).

We saw these fellows in Matt Molloy's, a pub we selected because it appeared in a book we both read: Round Ireland with a Fridge. It is a very funny account of a guy who, on a bet, hikes around Ireland with a fridge. Turns out Matt Molloy's is also famous because Matt was the flutist for the Chieftans, an Irish band you may have heard of.
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