25/08/2019 – First full day in Sligo. What to do, what to do? We are on public transport all week so a bit restricted. Buses don’t get going until late morning on Sunday but there’s an early-ish train so we decided to go for that. Looking for a combination of hills and prehistory we picked for our first day a trip to Slieve Daeane.
Short train ride (09:05 from Sligo) to Collooney. We headed along the Sligo Way north east through Union Wood (nice area) to Ballydawley then using the forest tracks past the stone row we climbed to the high point of the Sligo Way just south of the top. Leaving the track we made the short but steepish climb to the top of Slieve Daeane. There’s a decent sized cairn at the summit with a trigpoint on top. I bet the views from here are great on a good day. It wasn’t that day today. The cloud base was low. We sat next to the cairn, eating our butties, looking into not much of nothing. Good vibe to the place though.
Next we made our way west to the cairn on top of Slieve Dargan about 800 metres away. The straight line distance is short but the cloud made things a bit tricky plus there’s a good down and up between the two tops, very steep, grassy slopes. The cairn on Slieve Dargan has a good sized footprint but it’s pretty trashed. It’s listed as a passage tomb but I couldn’t see any internal structure.
Downhill and another 300 metres to the west is Cailleach a Vera’s House, a passage tomb on the last of the rises. The cloud had lifted by now so the view past the cairn to the landscape beyond was impressive as we made the approach. This is the pick of the three cairns we visited today. Visible passage and chamber which you can look down into. Really taken with this one and the location is excellent. Well worth a walk up.
From here it’s only about 350 metres back to the Sligo Way path. The terrain is rough and a bit wet but nothing really to put you off.
Meeting up again with the path, it was back west to Collooney to catch the train back to Sligo. A really nice day out.
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Posted by thelonious
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