Prince Charles and Duchess of Cornwall pay homage during visit to Co Sligo in Ireland, but Nobel laureate’s remains may have been mixed up with others’

Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall may have paid homage to the graveside of WB Yeats during their historic royal tour of Ireland last month, but now fresh doubts are being cast on whether or not the remains in the earth at Drumcliffe parish in Co Sligo actually belong to the Irish poet.

Yeats’s last wish before his death in France in 1939 was to be buried back in his beloved Co Sligo, which inspired so many of his poems. However, the poet wasn’t brought back to Ireland until 1948 owing to the second world war.

Now French official documents suggest the Nobel laureate’s remains may have been mixed up with others’ in France before exhumation.

The Irish Times reported on Saturday that French doubts over bones and remains are contained in personal correspondence between diplomats in Paris who were involved in the repatriation. This documentation was handed over to the Irish embassy in Paris last month, according to thenewspaper.

The bucolic Anglican churchyard, in the shadow of Ben Bulben mountain in Sligo, has become a shrine to Yeats ever since the poet was given a state funeral there in 1948. His poem Easter 1916 recounted the armed uprising against British rule, the execution of the rebellion’s leaders and his own ambivalent feelings towards the seminal event in Irish history, particular its last warning line: “A terrible beauty is born.”

On his gravestone is an inscription from his poem Under Ben Bulben, which became his epitaph: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death / Horseman, pass by”.

The Irish Times reported that the documents were found in the personal papers of the former French foreign ministry official Jacques Camille Paris, who later became the first secretary general of the Council of Europe. The newspaper said the diplomat’s son, Daniel Paris, gave the documents to the embassy in a discreet ceremony last month.

One of the documents the paper has seen states that French diplomats believed Yeats’s remains were “mixed pell-mell with other bones”.

The poet’s closest surviving relative, his granddaughter Caitriona Yeats, would not comment on the report, but she pointed to a letter written by his children, Anne and Michael Yeats in 1988, in response to earlier controversy over the remains. In that letter, the Yeats family said they were “satisfied beyond doubt” that his body was buried in Drumcliffe cemetery.

The Duke and the Duchess of Cornwall visited Drumcliffe church and the adjoining cemetery as part of events to mark the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s birth. It was a poignant stopover for Prince Charles before he and his wife later walked to the harbour at Mullaghmore, where the IRA murdered his great-uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten, as well as two young boys and a woman in her 80s in 1979.

During a religious service beside the spot where Yeats asked to be buried, the Prince was joined inside the Protestant church by a cross-community choir, which included the teenage granddaughter of a man killed by the Parachute regiment in Derry on Bloody Sunday in 1972.

In an address in Sligo, Prince Charles said: “We need no longer be victims of our difficult history with each other. Without glossing over the pain of the past, we can, I believe, integrate our history and memory in order to reap their subtle harvest of possibility.”