Ireland is a land of legends, green hills and various extraordinary beauties of nature. And one of these strange but beautiful wonders is Mount Ben Bulben.
Mount Ben Balben is located in County Sligo, in the far northwest of Ireland, 10 kilometers north of the city of Sligo. The height of the mountain is 527 meters. Ben Balben towers over the whole of County Sligo and is its symbol. Along with Nocknari and Croag Patrick, Ben Balben is one of the 3 most famous mountains in Ireland.
According to Irish legends, this mountain was inhabited by a monstrous boar from Ben Balben, who was killed by Diarmide and buried in Leh-na-muik hill, near Drumcliffe. In Drumcliffe, at the foot of Ben Balben, according to his wishes, the great Irish poet WB Yeats is buried.
It is believed that today the mountain looks like this during the last ice age. It is known that initially it had a high "hump", which was cut off by a creeping glacier. Ben Balben is composed almost entirely of limestone rocks.
Mount Ben Balben belongs to the mesas. Table Mountain (German Tafelberg, Spanish Mesa - in the lane table) is a mountain with a truncated, flat top. As a rule, mesas are composed of sedimentary rocks. The slopes of such mountains are usually steep, almost sheer. In cross-section, this type of geological formations has an oblong shape, that is, in one of the directions, the plateau at the top of the mountain is elongated. The table mountains are truncated in their upper part due to the processes of denudation - erosion and weathering. One of the varieties of mesas are those mountains in which their flat top is not made of sedimentary rocks, but is covered with hardened volcanic lava crust.
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In Ireland, since the thirteenth century, there has been a highly developed and popular genre of place poetry. Descriptions of mountains, valleys and lakes in a nostalgic and romantic vein, often combined with the complaints of an exile, are a typical feature of Celtic bardic poetry. One of the poems of this genre is Oisin's praise of Mount Ben-Balben (its original, "real" name is Benn Gulbine), whose powerful silhouette dominates the city of Sligo in western Ireland - in what is often called "Yeats' country".
The poem belongs to the so-called Finn cycle:
Benn Gulbine is not the same now
gloomy and gloomy like death, and it used to be from those heights
it was wonderful to see!
Deer gallop through the bushes
wheezing dogs and crying catches -
you knew many strong
about the mountain of great battles!
Herons moan in the evenings
wind noise in the night branches;
it was wonderful in the morning
listen to the singing of the first birds.
To see howling young
brave Fenian forests, and on their leashes -
fighting ferocious dogs.
Smell the cold dew of the night
that I lay down on the mountainside, hear the yapping of a fox, lonely cry of an eagle.
Or perched on a stump
listen to the thrush's pipe …
Patrick! that day has passed
it was wonderful to live then.
But even if Ben Balben were an ordinary mountain, it would still remain no less attractive for travelers - the beauty of its slopes will captivate the heart at first sight. The gentle slopes are overgrown with dense green grass, and at an altitude of about 300 meters the mountain begins to go up sharply, almost vertically - this is the Ben Balben phenomenon. Travelers say that the mountain is especially beautiful at dawn - however, it is better to see once than hear a hundred times!