Tour of Dromahair

Tour of Dromahair by Ann Treacy

July 3, 2009, 10:11 pm
Filed under: Dromahair

We have been staying this week in Dromahair. It’s in County Leitrim about half an hour away from Sligo city. Patrick has a friends here who has kindly invited us to stay at their place while they are in Italy. We stayed here with them last year. It’s a great house in a great town.

I thought we’d give a tour this time around. According to Wikipedia, the population of Dromahair is 509. Apparently WB Yeats used to visit here often to see the parish priest. Yeats refers to Dromahair in “The man who dreamed of Faeryland”:

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair
His heart hung all upon a silken dress
And he had known at last some tenderness
Before earth took him to her stony care…

We arrived on the night of the big summer festival, which was fun. There were bands playing and beer in the streets. Who could ask for anything more?

We’ve been checking out the town. They have clearly had a ton of building here in the last few years. There are loads of new homes – 3, 4, and 5 bedroom homes – but many of them are empty. It’s kind of a sign of the times.

The town is very nice. There are 3 pubs, a couple of hotels, a Catholic church, a Church of Ireland church, 2 grocery stores and a drug store, which we visited nearly every day with the kids being sick. And there’s that amazing restaurant we went to on Sunday. Also there’s the super cool Creevelea Abbey – which I’ll write about separately.