The cast-iron figure on Perch Rock is one of a pair. His identical twin stands on a clifftop above Tramore in County Waterford, on the opposite coast of Ireland. Both were erected in 1821 to mark hazardous approaches, both still serve as navigation aids two hundred years after their installation. The Rosses Point figure has acquired, in local affection, a personality - the locals describe him as distinctly camp, his pointing pose somewhere between authoritative and theatrical. Sail toward where he indicates and you find the deep channel. Sail anywhere else and you find the sandbars that have torn the bottoms out of careless boats since people first put boats into Sligo Bay.

Elsinore House stands above the strand at Rosses Point, now a ruin held upright largely by ivy. It was where the Pollexfen family - the merchants on William and Jack Yeats's mother's side - took the children on summer holidays. William turned the place and its surroundings into the verse that made him famous. Jack, the painter, turned them into canvases. The two brothers spent decades chasing the light and weather of this small piece of coast in different mediums. William's grave lies five kilometres east at Drumcliffe churchyard, beneath bare Ben Bulben's head, where he wrote himself an epitaph the parish put on the stone exactly as he asked: "Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by."

The Atlantic-facing coast of the peninsula runs north as a chain of beaches. First Beach is 400 metres of sand with parking, toilets, and summer lifeguards. Bowmore Point caps it, its little cabin painted bright. Beyond, Second Beach stretches a kilometre to Wren Point, where the kite-surfers gather to ride the steady westerlies that pour in off the ocean. Third Beach is the loneliest of the three, north of Wren Point along the spit that reaches toward the outflow of Drumcliffe Bay. Walk it at low tide and you can reach Lower Rosses lighthouse on its trestle tower, perched like a wading bird above the sands. Behind the beach, salt marshes thicken the ground. Across the estuary, the flat-topped wall of Benbulbin watches everything.

In 1864, a fleet of "oyster pirates" sailed into Sligo Bay to plunder the local beds. The Royal Irish Constabulary came out in force and the pirates were beaten back that day. It was not enough. Within a decade or two, the Sligo oyster beds were gone, fished out by people who had every legal right to be there. The pirates were merely the front edge of the appetite. Today the bay is quiet and Oyster Island - private property in the permanent channel east of Coney Island - keeps the name of an industry that vanished. Coney Island itself is reached at low tide by walking or driving across Cummeen Strand from Strandhill on the other side, where the rabbits outnumber the residents by a generous margin.

Six kilometres offshore, north of the bay, the uninhabited island of Inishmurray holds the ruins of an early medieval monastic complex - circular stone enclosure, beehive cells, a scatter of cross-slabs. Monks lived there from the sixth century until Viking raids made it untenable. The last full-time residents left in 1948. Since 2018, the landing point has been declared unsafe and no boat trips can put ashore there. Nobody has the money to repair it. Anglers can still fish its waters; nobody can walk among its ruins. It sits out there, beyond the Metal Man's arm, beyond the lifeboat station's range, slowly returning to weather and gull.