A field day for Seamus Heaney fanatics
A tour through County Derry, whose landscape inspired many of the poet’s best-known works

Passing Laurel Villa, you’d never suspect it was a Tardis. You have to enter this modestly proportioned house on the outskirts of the County Derry town of Magherafelt to taste its magic. Your first impression is of a beautifully kept B&B. Then you notice the photographs and paintings lining the walls: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney. There are poems printed on linen, and first editions in glass cases. Upstairs you pass bedroom doors: the Kavanagh Room, the MacNeice Room, the Heaney Room. Laurel Villa is a shrine (though a very unstuffy one) –a genuine House of Poetry.

Gerardine Kielt keeps things immaculate, and cooks the best breakfasts in Ireland; Eugene, her husband, organises poetry readings at Laurel Villa, and maintains contact with poets far and wide –including Seamus Heaney himself, the most celebrated and best-read living poet in these islands.

Read the full article in The Guardian, Travel here >

Lesser Spotted Ireland: On the trail of Seamus Heaney’s ghost
Local historian Eugene Kielt offers a tour of Derry locations linked to the late poet

Heaney country licks around the top-left-hand corner of Lough Neagh in east Co Derry. To the west are the Sperrins, and, on the far side of them, Derry city. The land between these two great topographical features is mostly flat – some of it bog but a lot of good farming land too.

This is the landscape that produced the poet. The place and its people were the muse for much of his memorable work.

I’m sitting in a car on Hillhead Road with Eugene Kielt, a local historian and enthusiast for all things Heaney. We are about 100m down from Mossbawn Farm, the poet’s childhood home.

Read the full article in The Irish Times here >