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W.B. Yeats spent significant parts of his childhood in Sligo and never entirely left it, even when he was living in London and Dublin. The distinctive silhouette of Benbulben mountain to the north and Knocknarea to the west, topped by the unexcavated passage tomb that tradition assigns to Queen Maeve, appear repeatedly in his poetry as specific, named places rather than generic Irish landscape. He is buried at Drumcliffe churchyard, six miles north of the town, under his self-written epitaph: 'Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by.' The grave gets visitors.

The town itself was founded in 1245 by the Norman knight Maurice Fitzgerald on the Garavogue River where it flows from Lough Gill to Sligo Bay.

It remained under native Irish control - the O'Conor Sligo confederation - throughout the medieval period, which gave it a different political character from the English-planted towns further south and east. The name comes from the Irish 'Sligeach,' meaning abounding in shells, from the shellfish beds at the estuary that fed people here for centuries before history started recording it.