Soon after Yeats published his famous escapist poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, an American fan wrote to him asking to be shown the island “where peace comes dropping slow”. Yeats was happy to do so and the American duly visited Sligo. Yeats took him out in a boat on Lough Gill - but was unable to locate the island.

Nowadays there is a 160km signposted trail around “Yeats Country” in the counties of Sligo and neighbouring Leitrim in the north-west corner of the Republic of Ireland. It takes in many of the landscapes and locations mentioned by the poet in his extensive writings - including Innisfree, though the locals will have you believe they don’t always show the real island to the Americans if they are touring in a coach too big to reach a suitable vantage point.

William Butler Yeats was a man of extraordinary contradictions. Born in 1865 of Anglo-Irish Protestant stock, he devoted much of his life to the manufacture of Irish literary “traditions”, revelling in Irish history and legend but never learning the language. A romantic poet, he was also a shrewd realist and practical manager of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin which he set up with the formidable Lady Gregory to be a national theatre for Ireland (in which the two of them staged their own plays and those of Synge and O’Casey).

He spent much of his life in London and Dublin but the family home of Sligo and its surroundings was always “home” and he was buried, eventually, in Drumcliff churchyard near Sligo. “Eventually”, because he died in France and it was not until 1948 that his remains were brought back to Ireland. One of his Last Poems begins: “Under bare Ben Bulben’s head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid An ancestor was rector there long years ago...”

The last lines form his actual epitaph.

Ben Bulben is a great glowering mountain and is mentioned in several of his poems. It is part of a wild and unspoilt landscape: large parts of Leitrim are simply “unused”. Sligo is a mixture of rolling moors, lakes flanked by heather and woods of bay and holly trees, and stunning waterfalls. Glencar Lake (featured in the poem “The Stolen Child”) can be a place of striking quietness.

Then there is what Yeats once called “Sinbad’s yellow shore”, the coastline around the port of Sligo. It was here on Rosses Point that Yeats believed he saw “the faeries”. He wrote in a letter: “I made a magical circle and invoked the faeries... there was great sound as of little people cheering away in the heart of the rock. The queen of the troop came then and I could see her. ”

This did not stop Yeats from going on to become a Nobel Prize winner and (following the establishment of the Irish Free State) a senator. His output of poems, plays (26 of them), letters and essays was prodigious. Quantity means some unevenness but it is easy to find critics who rank him very close to such greats as Shakespeare and Milton. At the least he deserves his space in the national curriculum.

The Irish Tourist Board publishes two brochures,which unfold to become posters, on Literary Ireland and Yeats Country through the Waterways of the Erne. School parties able to reach Sligo would gain at least as much from a visit to the region as others would from a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon while teachers would enjoy the Yeats International Summer School held in Sligo each August.

o Irish Tourist Board (Bord F ilte) 150 New Bond Street, London W1Y 0AQ. Tel: 0171 493 3201; and PO Box 273 Dublin 8. Yeats International Summer School, co The Secretary, Yeats Society, Yeats Building, Sligo, Co. Sligo.