We’re now in County Sligo (SLY-go), William Butler Yeats country. We enjoyed an excellent exhibit on his life and works at the National Library in Dublin. A prolific poet and playwright, he was one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, still going strong more than a century later. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. That’s some kudos.

Although born in County Dublin and raised in both Dublin and London, Yeats spent his childhood summers at his mother’s family home in County Sligo, a place he came to consider his “country of the heart.” His dying wish was to be buried in County Sligo, under the watchful eye of Benbulben, his favorite mountain. And he was, in the cemetery at St. Columba’s Church in Drumcliff, six kilometers from the foot of the mountain.

Today we walked a trail that circled the forest at the western foot of Benbulben, and I too was blown away by this stunning mountain. It changes appearance at every angle, and each vantage point tells a different story. 

For this blog, I had to pare down the number of photos Marcus took of the mountain, for the sake of brevity. Of the 73 he was happy with after his edit, I selected an essential forty. Still too many. It was painful, but I ended with a strong sixteen.

Marcus will take thousands of photos on an extended trip like this one. On each little excursion, such as this walk, I will pull myself away from the beauty I’m taking in to ask him if he got a shot of this rock or that stream, the little path running up to the fold in the mountain? But I can tell by his smile that he’s already got it. We see things the same way, for the most part, but sometimes he sees things I miss. And vice versa. I always eagerly await his next batch of photos so I can immerse myself all over again—and possibly discover something from an unexpected angle. And he anticipates every blog, reliving our adventures and perhaps encountering a perspective he hadn’t considered before.

This blog will become a treasured memory of a delightful day spent outdoors in an exquisite country. And the photos will pop up on our screensavers in the years to come, eliciting gasps of recognition and compelling us to take time out from whatever it is we’re doing to sit and take it all in again. We’re not only capturing images, both visual and emotive; we’re preserving moments in time to be enjoyed again later.

This is why we travel.