Racing in Yeats Country: Sligo's Setting and Story

Sligo Racecourse lies at Cleveragh, in the Cleveragh Demesne, about a kilometre south of Sligo town centre. The ground was once part of the Wood-Martin family estate, an area known locally as the Pump Field, and it sits low, close to the Garravogue river, in a natural bowl of land. That bowl is the first thing a visitor notices. The track drops away from the grandstand and climbs again on the far side, so the whole circuit is laid out below you like a stage, with the hills closing it in on every side. Few racecourses give you the entire race in one sweep of the eye the way Sligo does.

The backdrop is what lifts it. On one side stands Benbulben, the flat-topped mountain that is the emblem of the whole county, its long table of rock visible from most of the course. On the other rises Knocknarea, crowned by the great cairn traditionally said to be the grave of the warrior queen Maeve. Between them the land rolls down towards Sligo Bay and, inland, towards the wooded shores of Lough Gill. The grandstand and its suites look out across the parade ring towards Benbulben, and the racecourse leans into that view: its principal hospitality room is named the Benbulben Suite in recognition of the mountain that dominates the skyline.

The setting is not only pretty; it shapes the racing. Because the course sits in a hollow near the river, the ground holds water, and after heavy rain it can turn genuinely testing. A summer evening that looks benign from the stand can be hard, stamina-sapping work out on the turf. The circuit itself is a tight, undulating, right-handed oval of just over a mile, almost constantly on the turn, with an uphill run-in of just under two furlongs to a finish set below the hills. Horses are asked to balance themselves through sharp bends and then to climb, which is why Sligo tends to reward speedier, prominent types with enough stamina to see out the hill.

For a spectator, the compactness is part of the charm. This is not a vast, sprawling track where the runners disappear for minutes at a time. The whole contest happens in front of you, framed by mountains, close enough that you can watch a race unfold from first stride to the climb home. On a still August evening, with the light going long over Benbulben and the field turning for the pull to the line, Sligo makes a strong claim to be the most beautifully placed racecourse in the country.

Sligo is Yeats country, and the racecourse sits squarely inside it. The poet W.B. Yeats spent formative years in the county and drew on its landscape all his life. He is buried at Drumcliffe churchyard, a few miles north of the town, in the shadow of the very mountain that forms the racecourse backdrop. The famous epitaph on his headstone looks out towards Benbulben, and the mountain that stands behind the winning post at Cleveragh is the same one that stands over his grave. That is the honest measure of the connection: the course and the poet share a horizon.

There is no record here of Yeats as a racegoer, and it would be a stretch to make him one. The link is one of place, not of the man himself in the stands. What binds them is the landscape, and the racecourse has always been comfortable saying so. When the current Cleveragh course opened in 1955, the very first card leaned into the association: it included a Lough Gill Maiden Plate and a Benbulben Handicap Hurdle, named for the lake and the mountain that Yeats made famous. Reporting the opening in the Irish Independent, the commentator Michael O'Hehir set the scene by placing the new track amid "historic Knocknaree Hill and famed Benbulben," the same features that run through the poet's work.

The area around the course reads like a gazetteer of Yeats's imagination. Lough Gill, whose wooded shores lie a short way inland, holds the Lake Isle of Innisfree. Knocknarea and its cairn, the reputed grave of Queen Maeve, close the western skyline. Cleveragh itself is known locally as the place of the basket makers, and its sally gardens are reputed to have inspired "Down by the Sally Gardens," one of the best loved of all his songs. A racegoer who arrives early and looks around is standing in the middle of the landscape that shaped one of the great bodies of modern poetry.

None of this decides a race, but it colours the day. Sligo is one of the few places where you can spend an afternoon at the horses and, in the same short drive, take in a poet's grave beneath a mountain, a megalithic cemetery at Carrowmore, and a lake with its own island of verse. The racing is small; the surroundings are not. That contrast, ordinary country racing set in extraordinary country, is a large part of what gives a day at Cleveragh its particular flavour.

Sligo runs a short season, around eight or nine fixtures between May and October, and most of them are summer evening meetings. That is central to the character of the place. An evening card at Cleveragh, on a warm night with the light softening over Benbulben, is a relaxed and sociable affair, closer to a night out than a serious day at the races. The gates open two hours before the first, the crowd drifts in, and the racing runs into the long northern dusk. For holidaymakers and locals alike, it is an easy, unhurried way to spend an evening.

The centrepiece of the year is the two-day August meeting, run on consecutive weekdays and carrying the track's biggest crowds. It comes hot on the heels of the Galway Festival, and it splits neatly across the two days. The opening day is a Flat card, branded Diageo Day, built around the meeting's feature Flat race, the Irish Stallion Farms EBF Connacht Oaks. It is worth being clear about that race: the Connacht Oaks is a fillies' handicap, run over about a mile and a quarter, not a Classic. It shares only a name with the Curragh's Group 1 Irish Oaks. What it does deliver is a competitive, often big-priced handicap that gives the Flat day its focus.

The second day is the social highlight. This is Ladies Day, run as a National Hunt evening card, and it is the busiest and most dressed-up occasion in the Sligo calendar, complete with a best-dressed competition that has been judged by names from the fashion world. There is no dress code at Sligo in the ordinary run of things, and racegoers wear what suits the weather, but Ladies Day sees hats and fascinators come out in force. Later in the season, the autumn Students Day is another famously lively fixture, popular with the local university crowd, and there is a July Family Day aimed at younger visitors.

The atmosphere is friendly rather than fashionable. Sligo draws heavily on its own community, with themed days that speak to local sporting clubs and societies, and the tone is welcoming to newcomers who would not know a Group race from a maiden. The compact site helps: everything is close at hand, the parade ring sits right below the stand, and you are never far from the action or the bar. It is racing at a human scale, in a beautiful place, with the emphasis firmly on the day out.

Without a champion of its own, Sligo's lore is built from occasions and from the horsemen who have mastered its tricky, turning circuit. The best remembered single day in modern times came on 20 May 2015, when the then Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, now King Charles III and Queen Camilla, attended an evening meeting during a visit to Ireland. The course was celebrating its 60th anniversary, and the couple presented the prize for the specially named Duke and Duchess of Cornwall Mares' Maiden Hurdle. It was won by the mare Mollyanna, trained by Colin Bowe and ridden by Mark Walsh, who had earlier landed the first of a double on the card. In the weeks that followed, the Duchess bought the mare, and Mollyanna went into training in England.

The course also has a strong claim on record-book history. It was at Sligo, on 15 July 2018, that the amateur rider Patrick Mullins rode his 546th winner, aboard Queens Boulevard for his father Willie, to pass Ted Walsh's long-standing total and become the winning-most amateur in Irish racing history. It was a fitting place for a Mullins landmark, because no yard has ruled Sligo like theirs.

Willie Mullins is the outstanding jumps trainer at the course by a distance. Since 2009 he has racked up around 30 jumps wins here, well clear of Gordon Elliott, and at a strike rate that stands comparison with his very best tracks anywhere. According to the analysts at Geegeez, that Sligo strike rate has run above 48 per cent, one of only a handful of Irish courses where his numbers climb past the 40 mark. On the Flat, the long-serving figure is Dermot Weld, the leading Flat trainer at Sligo, whose winners here have included the 2019 Connacht Oaks scorer Kastasa.

What ties these threads together is the idea of the course specialist. Sligo's constant turning and its uphill finish ask particular questions, and horses that answer them tend to come back and answer them again, so much so that previous course form is treated as a real positive. The demands are stiff enough that, by one reckoning, no jumps horse has won more than three times here since 1988. That is Sligo in miniature: no legends carved in marble, but a track hard enough to sort out those who truly handle it, run in front of the finest backdrop in Irish racing.