Ben Bulben
Interesting facts
- Yeats's epitaph was cut, at his own instruction, into limestone quarried close to the churchyard beneath the mountain.
- The cluster of Arctic-alpine plants on the plateau is thought to be around 100,000 years old, surviving here since before the last glaciers retreated.
- Besides fringed sandwort, the plateau shelters alpine saxifrage, arctic meadow-rue and snowbed willow, rare relics of a colder Ireland.
- A rhyme recorded by Yeats in The Celtic Twilight credits Ben Bulben and nearby Knocknarea with saving many sailors from shipwreck.
- In his poem On a Political Prisoner, Yeats remembers Constance Markievicz riding beneath Ben Bulben on her way to meetings.
- According to legend, Fionn mac Cumhaill found his long-lost son Oisín on the mountain, which is also said to be the resting place of Diarmuid and Gráinne.
- Barite was mined at Glencarbury in the Dartry range, close to Ben Bulben, from 1894 until 1979.
- The steep north face takes the full force of Atlantic gales, while the southern side rises at a much gentler slope.
- In September 1922, during the Irish Civil War, six anti-Treaty fighters remembered as the Noble Six were hunted down and killed on its slopes.
- In 1943 a US Army Air Forces B-17 Flying Fortress crashed on neighbouring Truskmore, and local people carried the injured crew off the mountain.
Why it is worth it
Ben Bulben looks less like a mountain than a ship run aground on the plain of north Sligo: a long, flat-topped table of rock, 526 metres high, its sides falling in steep cliffs towards the coastal plain and the Atlantic. Its shape is the work of the last Ice Age. The Dartry Mountains were once a broad plateau, and glaciers moving from north-east to south-west planed it down and cut back its edges, leaving Ben Bulben standing above the ice as a nunatak.
The rock tells an older story still. The upper cliffs are formed of hard Dartry Limestone, laid down in a shallow sea some 345 to 330 million years ago, during the Carboniferous; below it lie the thinner Glencar Limestone and the soft Benbulben Shale of the lower slopes, all of them full of fossil shells, and in the shale, corals. The cold summit plateau holds a remarkable cluster of Arctic–alpine plants, among them fringed sandwort, which grows nowhere else in Ireland and which research in 2012 showed has been present here since the last Ice Age. The mountain is also home to red-billed choughs. In the Irish name, Binn Ghulbain, binn means peak; Ghulbain may mean beak or jaw, or may recall Conall Gulban, a son of Niall of the Nine Hostages.
Few Irish landscapes are more crowded with story. Ben Bulben is said to have been a hunting ground of the Fianna, and in the tale of Diarmuid and Gráinne it is here that Diarmuid meets his death from an enchanted boar, tricked into the hunt by Fionn mac Cumhaill. On the plain below, St Columba is said to have fought the 6th-century battle of Cúl Dreimhne over the right to a copied psalter. Above all, this is the heart of "Yeats Country". The mountain runs through the poetry of W. B. Yeats, and his last poem, Under Ben Bulben, describes his own grave beneath it. He lies in Drumcliff churchyard, in the shadow of the mountain, under the epitaph "Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!"
Getting there
Ben Bulben rises about 11 km north of Sligo, which is the terminus of a mainline railway. The N15 road passes below the mountain through Drumcliff, about 8 km north of Sligo. The nearest airport is Ireland West Airport Knock (NOC), about 56 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Benbulbin, sometimes Benbulben or Ben Bulben, is a steep-sided and flat-topped mountain in County Sligo, Ireland. It is part of the Dartry Mountains, in an area sometimes called "Yeats Country". Benbulbin, 526 m (1,726 ft) high, formed as a nunatak during the last Ice Age.
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