Dear fellow travellers,
In the collection of interviews that is the closest thing Seamus Heaney ever published to an autobiography, the Nobel prize winner describes the journey to school from his childhood home at Mossbawn farm in County Derry.
The Lagans Road ran for about three-quarters of a mile across an area of wetlands. It was one of those narrow cobblestoned country roads, with a grass crown in the middle, grass verges on either side of it, and - behind the hedges - marsh and bog and little shrubs and birch trees. For a minute or two every day, therefore, you were in the wilderness[…].
Marsh and bog and little shrubs. Hawthorn hedges and solitary birch trees. As we drive through the rain over a rolling landscape from the shore of Lough Neagh towards the village of Bellaghy, the only thing missing through the scene beyond the rain-smeared car windows from this vision of Heaney’s childhood in the late 1940s are the cobblestones.
The family moved the few miles from Mossbawn to Bellaghy in 1954, by which time Heaney was already a boarder at St Columb’s College in Derry. A few years later he would move to Belfast to university, and then on and out into the world, before eventually settling in Dublin in 1976. But if he called that Dublin house “home” for the rest of his life, his “homeplace” remained somewhere else. And most particularly whenever he put pen to paper.
At the modern Seamus Heaney HomePlace, a beautiful exhibition, library, café and cultural space that opened on the edge of Bellaghy in 2016, one of the friendly team welcome us in the lobby where we stand in the gaze of two enormous photographs of the poet, one as an older man, the other as a boy.
“When you walk through you’ll see a map that shows how close we are to the places of Seamus’ childhood,” explains the guide. “The farm and the school. The Lough and Lagans Road. These places were the subjects of about half the poems he wrote. Just think about that! Half the life’s work of a Nobel prize winner, all within a few square miles of where we are standing. So he would have called this his homeplace, and that’s how we got our name.”
As we walk through the exhibition, learning about Heaney’s life story, his family and the people and places that inspired him, I think about this concept of ‘homeplace’ and how you can spend a whole life feeling rooted at a distance, to those places that helped form the person that you are. Not far from the map, where you can listen to Heaney reading poems about the places marked on it, there is a quote from his brother Hugh:
Seamus’s feet never left the ground and you could nearly say he never left Bellaghy.
There is a reason, I think, why some places resonate with you, even if they are a brand new experience, whether in person or through the poetry or prose of others. Heaney writes about his homeplace with such precision. His words trigger memories of people and places and moments of our own. Listening to Heaney reading those poems, in a quiet exhibition in Bellaghy just a mile or so from where he was laid to rest, I am taken from the Irish landscape just outside to other places entirely.
This continues as we make our way back to Belfast. As the rain pounds the windscreen I am seeing our surroundings not only through Heaney’s poetry but memories of homeplaces of my own. Broken branches on quiet country lanes. Old stone barns with curved, corrugated roofs. Sodden sheep in their waterlogged coats. A line of trees, skeletal against the winter sky, looking like a line-up of giant witches’ broomsticks.
I am in Ireland. I am in Wales. I am in the north of England. I am in Germany. For a moment I am in Heaney’s homeplace, then my own, then those of my family, my partner and my daughter. A line from Heaney – “I returned to a long strand, / the hammered shod of a bay” - takes me to the Baltic coast. A parade of trees against a bleak sky recalls a view through a taxi window somewhere outside Moscow. Heaney’s description of his childhood classrooms transports me to four rooms in a prefab structure in the foothills of the Himalayas.
One of the joys of travel is to experience somewhere new. To see things and meet people that open your eyes to the magic of all that this world can offer. But the joy is also in finding those moments of connection. That places and the people that make and maintain them have more in common than you might first think, that there is much that we share, and that while our stories may never be exactly the same, they often rhyme.
Paul Scraton
