Attraction in County Sligo

Carrowmore near Sligo town is the largest and one of the oldest megalithic cemetery complexes in Ireland, a collection of over sixty prehistoric monuments including passage tombs, dolmens and stone circles covering a wide area of the lowland plain below the great cairn of Queen Maeve on Knocknarea to the west. The oldest monuments at Carrowmore have been dated to approximately 5,500 years ago, making them among the earliest megalithic monuments in western Europe and among the oldest passage tombs in Ireland, predating Newgrange by several centuries. The scale and variety of the Carrowmore complex is immediately impressive. The monuments range from small boulder circles enclosing central megalithic structures to larger and more elaborate passage tombs of considerable ambition, and their distribution across the flat limestone plain creates a landscape of concentrated archaeological significance that has been compared to the great cemetery landscapes of the Boyne Valley and the Orkneys. Many of the monuments are well preserved, retaining the structural logic of their original construction in a way that allows the visitor to understand the Neolithic building tradition. The Visitor Centre at Carrowmore provides interpretation of the complex and manages access to the most significant monuments. The combination of the archaeological interest, the views to the surrounding Sligo landscape including the dramatic profile of Knocknarea above the plain and the exceptional age of the monuments makes Carrowmore one of the most significant prehistoric heritage sites in Ireland.

Lissadell House on the shores of Sligo Bay in County Sligo is a Greek Revival country house of the 1830s whose significance in Irish cultural history far exceeds its architectural quality, the house having been the childhood home of the revolutionary sisters Constance Markievicz and Eva Gore-Booth, two of the most remarkable women in the cultural and political history of modern Ireland, and the subject of one of W B Yeats's most celebrated late poems. The combination of the Gore-Booth family history, the Markievicz connection and the Yeats association makes Lissadell one of the most charged heritage sites in Connacht. Constance Gore-Booth, who married the Polish Count Markievicz and became one of the most significant figures in the Irish revolutionary movement, was sentenced to death for her role in the 1916 Easter Rising, the sentence commuted on account of her sex in one of the most dramatic episodes of the Rising's aftermath. She subsequently became the first woman elected to the British Parliament, though she did not take her seat, and the first woman to serve as a government minister when appointed Minister for Labour in the first Dáil in 1919. Yeats visited Lissadell on several occasions and his memories of the two sisters in their youth, The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows open to the south, forms one of the most direct and most moving of his late poems, giving the house a permanent place in the Irish literary imagination.