Drumcliffe is a small, yet historically rich town located approximately 6 km north of Sligo City, along the N15 (Sligo-Donegal) National Primary road in Co. Sligo in the Northwest of Ireland. Colmcille founded a monastery in Drumcliffe in about 575 and the village is also famous for its Irish High Cross dating to the 9th century, which stands in the grounds of the former abbey. Across the road is
the stump of a Round Tower, which was struck by lightning in 1396."Celtic High Cross at Drumcliff". The village is best known for its round tower dating from the 10th or 11th century and as the final resting place of the poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), who is buried in the graveyard of St. Columba's Church of Ireland church. Although Yeats died in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France in January 1939, his remains were brought home to Ireland by the Irish Naval Service and re-interred at Drumcliff in 1948 in the presence of a large number of local people and dignitaries which included the Minister for External Affairs, Seán MacBride, who represented the Government. The village is shown on Ptolemy's map of Ireland as Nagnata and was once a thriving town, as John Butler Yeats remarked in a letter to his son W B Y in 1913: " In his time there were forty houses between the rectory gate and the round tower, now there is only one. In my grandfather's time he & the parish priest were friends. Maynooth did not exist, and the priest was educated in the liberal atmosphere of a French College, and possibly both of them read Voltaire and Gibbon. One of the peasants told me he remembered the priest getting up a bonfire to celebrate my grandfather's return to the parish from a protracted sojourn in Dublin".
