Qualla: Benbulbin

Benbulbin: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hellowiki789, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a September day in 1948, the body of William Butler Yeats came home to Sligo and was buried in the small churchyard at Drumcliff, exactly where he had asked to be laid down: under bare Ben Bulben's head. The mountain that gave the line its weight rises 526 metres above the coastal plain, flat-topped and steep-sided, a long limestone wall that catches the Atlantic light and throws shadows across the fields below. Glaciers shaped it during the last Ice Age, scraping a high plateau into its present silhouette. Out here in north Sligo, you do not look at Benbulbin - it looks at you, and at everything else for thirty kilometres in every direction.

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Image: Hellowiki789 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Benbulbin: A Mountain That Was a Plateau

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joebater at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Benbulbin is a nunatak - rock that stood above the ice during the last glacial period, when most of Ireland lay beneath glaciers. The mountain was originally a much larger limestone plateau, shaped into its present form by ice moving from northeast to southwest, which carved away...

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Image: Joebater at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Benbulbin: Plants That Beat the Ice Age

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:The.Q, CC BY-SA 2.5. Because Benbulbin's summit stays cooler than the surrounding lowlands, it hosts a community of Arctic-alpine plants that exist nowhere else in Ireland. In 2012, researchers established that the fringed sandwort found on its ledges has been growing here for around 100,000 years - ...

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Image: en:The.Q | CC BY-SA 2.5

Benbulbin: The Noble Six

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:FoekeNoppert, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 20 September 1922, during the Irish Civil War, six anti-Treaty Republican fighters were hunted across these slopes by National Army forces. Their names were Brigadier Seamus Devins TD (an elected member of the Dáil), Brian MacNeill, Captain Harry Benson, Lieutenant Paddy Carro...

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Image: User:FoekeNoppert | CC BY-SA 3.0

Benbulbin: Two Planes, Both Down

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bob Embleton, CC BY-SA 2.0. During the Second World War, two military aircraft crashed into the Dartry Mountains close to Benbulbin. On 21 March 1941, an RAF Catalina flying boat using the Donegal Corridor - the narrow strip of Irish airspace neutral Ireland allowed Allied aircraft to traverse - crashed at ...

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Image: Bob Embleton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Benbulbin: Under Ben Bulben

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gavin & Andrew Stewart, CC BY 2.0. Yeats began writing about this mountain decades before he asked to be buried beneath it. In his 1893 collection The Celtic Twilight, in his poem On a Political Prisoner, in his late great poem Under Ben Bulben - the mountain is woven into the imaginative geography that became kno...

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Image: Gavin & Andrew Stewart | CC BY 2.0

Benbulbin: Things Done in Its Shadow

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, United States, CC BY 2.0. Benbulbin overlooks the village of Mullaghmore, where Lord Mountbatten and three others - including two children - were murdered by an IRA bomb in 1979. In 1977 Sinn Féin's Brits Out campaign painted the mountain itself with slogans 180 feet wide and 25 feet high; the H-Block let...

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Image: Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, United States | CC BY 2.0