Sligo Walk Tours

08/06/2026

Well done to all in Sligo Tidy Towns and Sligo County Council involved in keeping the town looking well.

Sligo has been named as Ireland's cleanest town again, according to the latest survey from the business group Irish Business Against Litter.

13/05/2026

New art mural on Water Lane

05/05/2026

At the OPW heritage journal launch.

28/04/2026

When you go on holiday with a history lover…

You stop to read a plaque, and suddenly you’re in the middle of a 16th-century siege.

This one tells the story of the siege of Sligo Castle in 1595, during the Nine Years’ War, when materials taken from the nearby Abbey were used to build a battering ram to try to breach the walls.

24/04/2026

Back into Irish folklore this week.
Stories of bonfires, eels, cures, fairy music and strange encounters, shaped by the kind of characters you only get in oral tradition.

Interesting to see how some of these travelled from Ireland’s Own, (often the bane of the folklorist trying to collect original material) into storytelling, and then back again in new forms.

The Bedside Book of Irish Folklore by Séamas Ó Catháin (1980).

21/04/2026

To be fair, I was stronger in history than geography

08/01/2026

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Marion Dowd to Sligo Central Library for a lunchtime talk on cillíní throughout County Sligo.

Children's burial grounds, commonly known as cillíní, occur across Ireland. These were informal burial grounds used between the 1700s and the 1960s for the burial of unbaptised babies and those denied burial in consecrated ground by the Catholic Church. Typically, the unbaptised baby was buried at night by the father or closest male relative, without ceremony or funeral, and placed in an unmarked grave. Many ringforts and abandoned ecclesiastical sites were re-used for burial of the unbaptised. In other cases, babies were buried beside the home, on the seashore, and beside boundaries. Until recently, 23 cillíní were recorded in County Sligo, but new research has more than doubled that figure.

📅 𝗪𝗲𝗱𝗻𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝟮𝟭 𝗝𝗮𝗻𝘂𝗮𝗿𝘆
🕐 𝟭.𝟬𝟬 𝗽𝗺 𝘁𝗼 𝟮.𝟯𝟬 𝗽𝗺
📍 𝗦𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗼 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗟𝗶𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗿𝘆

Booking required
📞 0719111675
✉️ [email protected]

Sligo County Council ATU Sligo & ATU St Angelas The Sligo Field Club Sligo Heritage Office County Sligo Heritage and Genealogy Centre Sligo - Live Invest Visit

08/12/2025

A lovely milestone.
My account of child prisoners in Sligo Gaol has just been published in the newest volume of Childhood and the Irish, edited by Salvador Ryan.
The collection explores childhood in Ireland across 1,500 years, and I’m delighted to see Sligo’s story included.