Field Work in Heaneyland, March 2017
A travel-blog, with Seamus Heaney's collection Field Work as a guide to his home place.
We came from the north-west, via Eglinton, Greysteel and Ballykelly.
We roundabouted Limavady, then turned south-east, through Ringsend
and on to Garvagh, where we traversed the great main street,
southwards then, in the hired car, expertly steered by The Driver,
not long retired from her day job. We drove parallel to the
north-south line of the river Bann, the spine of our three day jaunt,
The Poet’s Field Work, our Baedeker. A scenic diversion
then. After we crossed the bridge at Swatragh, we turned westwards,
toward the hills at the Glenshane end of the Sperrins, the sky
mountains. Then, south once more, yet again parallel to the great
river and we entered Heaneyland, via Slaughtneil.
Did we come to the wilderness for this?
In the midst of scrub-land and hard-earned fields, with hill, moss
and bog all around, dainty bungalows and sturdy farm-houses flew the
maroon and white chequered and halved banners of local GAA pride. We
found the fenced-in green sward, lined chalk-white, bookended by
uprights parallel as telegraph poles, where the access was brown and
pock-marked by football studs – circles, chevrons, triangles –
made at the coming and going of hurlers, camógs and footballers. We
stood, The Driver and This Writer, beside the pitch named for Robert
Emmet, who, in 1803, brazened the death-confirming judge with 'Be yet
patient! I have but a few more words to say. I am going to go to my
cold and silent grave. My lamp of life is nearly extinguished. My
race is run. The grave opens to receive me and I sink into its
bosom'. A woman took our photograph, we, unlikely tourists, from the
nearby city, keenly celebrating this totem of community living and
sporting achievement, while enquiring about prospects for games to
come and relishing the achievements of games played.
Visitations are taken for signs.
We shopped at the post and tourist office at Carn, where public signs
gave information as easily in Irish as they did in English. A soft,
foam hurlóg for the wee man in London. Stamps and Saint
Patrick's Day cards, as Ghaeilge, for the emigrant children.
Then we southered on to Maghera, turned east, then, at the town's
centre, to cross flat land, alternating pasture and bog, and
undulated through Gulladuff, where the road slipped from B to C,
though always viable, until we approached the heart of Heaneyland.
Like cardiac surgeons coming in from the back, we entered the town of
Bellaghy, patient on its Bann river plain. We saw utility and
out-buildings, a store and sheds, the steely spire of a boiler-house
chimney, the likes of which a small poultry-processing plant might
have. We reached our destination, the centre built to honour The
Poet. We arrived at the Seamus Heaney Homeplace in Bellaghy.
Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground,
Each verse returning like the plough turned round.
The scones were ace. The staff, including a dryad, was welcoming and
knowledgeable. The Poet's duffle-coat, fawn as lough sedge, hung his
simulacrum in a glass case. His beaming, big-man's head welcomed us.
His small-boy's face grinned 'hello' as we paid our way to enter the
vivacious monochrome portals of The Seamus Heaney Homeplace. But,
first, the scones, delicate griddle-fare, melting and soaking the
butter pads. The coffees were barista-ed perfectly, layer atop layer
swimming in tall glasses, far from anything with which The Driver,
This Writer or The Poet were reared. Frank Wilson's 'Do I love you?',
number 1 in the Northern Soul Top 500, burbled from the sound system
above our heads. We almost danced round our chairs. I looked at The
Driver, her pen poised over the crossword. 'An ecstatic dancer with
Dionysus', six letters, beginning with 'm'. We were deep in
Heaneyland then, the Greek province, where the Maenad had danced us,
in a hired Supermini Corsa. I answered Frank Wilson's question
without hesitation. “Indeed I do.” The Poet and the work he made
were well homaged by the people he lived among. The Seamus Heaney
Homeplace is a boon and a bliss.
Our first night years ago in that hotel
When you came with your deliberate kiss.
Onward then, until we pulled in at the entrance to a bungalow. An old
milk churn in the garden advertised Airbnb. We dismounted and crossed
to the low, green bank above the wildfowl reserve. The sun remained
kind. The wind dulled its morning edge. There were high clouds, lacy
and cottony as angel wings. In the near distance: the island and the
spire; the river and small lake, tungsten in the mid-day haze.
The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
Church Island's spire, its soft treeline of yew.
Two lycra-clad walkers briskly directed us onward. We kept the river
on our right, until we reached the Bulrush Horticulture Limited
junction. We saw the industrial plant where top-layers sliced from
the bog were sifted and sacked for sale in garden centres, so that
the geology of Heaneyland was scattered far and wide as horticultural
substrate, a re-constituted mossbawn, globalised and monetised far
beyond the home place. We turned right and dead-ended at the northern
tip of Lough Beg, with its neat car-park and welcoming signs,
offering the river to canoeists and to us.
A silence of water
lipping the brink
The sun charmed. There were birds calling in the trees, the sound of
Spring arising from a cold spell. There was access to the water, via
a slipway and a modern pontoon, rendered slip-proof by wire mesh,
dense as blood vessels, pinned to the rubber-matted surface.
Magherafelt District Council workers picked with pointed beaks and
filled their delicate bags with the fag ends and paper leavings of a
quiet weekend.
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.
Skimming and veering
breast to breast with himself
in the clouds in the river
Hooper swans decorated the fields beside the quiet road. We kept the
Bann river on our right. Always evident, even when not seen, evident
in the big sky arcing above it, the Spring-disguised blue of cuckoo
eggs, for the year was still young and the day would turn to twilight
as soon as it could. But not yet.
It was all crepuscular and iambic
We drove to a grand arcade, not yet Brexitted, parking the hired car
in a sparred Euro-space. We bought lunch – salads, rough bread,
chicken pieces, smooth orange juice, tabasco, potato crisps –
amidst accents burred and rural as Galloway. We crossed the
countyline at Portglenone, beside its marina of pleasure boats and
cruisers. We turned south once more, past the monastery and made for
the woods, where old oaks and new plantings rolled down to the river
bank once more. The log we picnicked at was ash, smooth and
skin-grey. The Bann river ran tea-brown to the sea, small wavelets
scudding over each other in the contrary wind. The sun blessed us
all, though we were chilly; the picnickers, the dog walkers, the shy,
young couples. We ate and addressed our Field Work.
Slubbed with eddies
the laden silent river
ran mud and olive into summer
There, on the opposite bank, more people walked, living the day and
relishing the tree-lined river, first seen as a trickle from the
round back of Slieve Muck, counties away, beside the Irish Sea. The
watershed turned it inland and northwards to create lakes en route to
the broad Atlantic. The long, hardy route.
A woman walking two huge Bernese Hounds, far from their Alpine home,
white-chested, gloss-black backed, with sepia fringes, majestic and
vulnerable, out of place yet thoroughly present, was unsure of the
way. We offered our best advice. 'Follow the red dots'. Later, we
followed our own advice, turned our backs on the river of the
goddess Bann and made our way to a pond, where yellow reeds stood
sentinel in the quiet water and the green glow. We selfied the memory
and laughed.
Where sally tree went pale in every breeze,
Where the perfect eye of the nesting bird watched
bamboo rods stuck leniently out,
nodding and waiting, feelers into quiet
The lyrics of Jimmy Kennedy, under their colourful technicolour sheet
music covers, decorated the walls of the Michael Longley room in
Laurel Villa, our guest-house in Magherafelt, where the sanctuary
that is the home of Geraldine and Eugene Kielt welcomed us. The three
church spires of the town were visible from our window, giving a
multidimensional, multi-denominational perspective of faith and
a-spir-ation, tending heavenwards. The town itself was a throw of
spokes from a diamond hub. The guest house was a treasure trove of
The Poet's lore, where the knowledgeable and welcoming hosts provided
breakfasts of such quality that each plate was an elegance and a
treat. We made small talk that was weighty and wondrous, filling and
dainty as the fresh scones. How did she get so much flavour into
them? We took directions, gathered information and looked forward to
our second day as we curled up in the canopy bed, murmuring Jimmy
Kennedy song titles – Old Faithful, South of the Border,
The Isle of Capri and Red Sails in the Sunset, so
beloved of This Writer's mother, herself a singer, forceful, yet
gentle, always in tune and as delicately air-filled as a child's
blown bubble.
'Give us the raw bar!'
'Sing it by brute force
If you forget the air.'
Raise it again, man.
We still believe what we hear.
We drove to the woods at Drumnaph, where a helpful sign showed us the
route, in English and in Irish, the two languages echoing comfortably
together in an official matter. We trusted to the woodland path
before us, then tramped across the wooden walkway over the bog,
before entering an ancient oakland that calmed us both. Sunshine
then, finding cleavages and crevasses and clefts in the dense foliage
and timber around us, right down to our feet, as we picked our way
across the welcoming roots and moss. No forked steps then.
How perilous it is to chose
not to love the life we're shown?
Surprised to come on open ground once more, showing new plantings, we
followed the route markers to land in the middle of a pre-historic
site, an ancient stone circle. The ring was still there, an echo and
a shade of the original, but clearly evident in a landscape that is
forever changing as time, weather and animals move across it. It
stood as a portal to worlds beyond the current Anthropocene and
became a way for us to plumb roots linking us to the ground, so that
we, human animals, might not make such fools of ourselves and of our
children's children as would destroy this nest we inhabit, spinning
and orbiting around our star, one among millions and our only
home-place. The Driver and This Writer then found a new-sculpted
stone circle, erected by local people and we were gladdened, though
it was gently kitsch. There was a pond and then a river, a tumult of
water, tumbling and rolling its way to the Grillagh Road, where our
car awaited us. We arrived there in an enlivening breeze and with
such an earful of birdsong that we departed cheerful and refreshed.
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.
A singer on the radio feigned Nashville angst as we sat to late
morning coffee and scones in the café at the old linen mill in
Upperlands. The site of the end of the 19th century
labours of the workers hired by Wallace Clarke was transformed into
an industrial heritage site, a museum in a huge warehouse and a
cul-de-sac of small enterprise units, ubiquitously modern. The old
linen mill buildings loomed above. Yet another small river churned
under a bridge, delighting us. There was a surfeit of water: small
rivers and ponds, scutching dams and bleaching greens. There were
workers' house in neat rows, each one fronted with a long garden,
from which to garner food and leisure, vital sustenances for mill
workers pledged to scutch and mill and bleach recalcitrant vegetation
to make the linen for shirts and underwear for the quality. The
Driver and This Writer admired the grand photograph of the mill
workers of all grades, a tiered multitude of them and their families,
then wondered at the labour and the legacy of human endeavour.
What do we say anymore
to conjure the salt of our earth?
We drove to the great market town of Kilrea, home of famous soccer
managers, Martin O’Neill and Kenny Shiels, where The Driver found
ample parking for the Supermini Corsa, in spaces designated for the
tractors, lorries, wagons and SUVs that attend the cattle and sheep
mart. A wonder: the dryad from the Seamus Heaney Homeplace, vivacious
as ever, met us by chance and offered us further kindness, wisdom and directions to a picnic spot by the river. Once more we shopped
for lunch: local wholemeal bread, salad greens, tomatoes, thinly
sliced ham, fruit and sticky buns. We left Kilrea by an angle of
ninety degrees turn and southered once more at the War Memorial,
keeping the river to our left, still on the Derry side. We failed to
find the exit given by the dryad's directions, but informed by her
grace, we came across Hutchinson Quay, where sunlight dappled the
water, shimmering at us in welcome.
And the trees opened into a shady
Unexpected clearing where we sat down.
A Canadian canoe arrived, strapped to the top of a low car. A man got
out, donned a Stetson, then stretched his arms into the bright air.
As he began to unhook the canoe, slowly and steadily, we returned to
our picnic. Tabasco sauce fired the sliced ham. Tomatoes layered
sunsets on cheddar, roughly cut. Orange juice, vivid as rapeseed
flowers glowing in the sun, quenched our thirsts. Brown bread, chunky
enough to sustain farm labourers, was a bounty for easy-going
picnickers, who’s only Field Work was
The Poet’s great book.
The canoe passed us, the man in the
Stetson half-visible underneath. We lost sight of it as the man
descended the pontoon, readying to enter the water, which sparkled
even more joyously in greeting now. We tidied the remnants of our
food, stashed them in the boot of the car and made for the riverside
path, heading south, straight as a die beside and against the current
of the Bann. Flat ground, dry earth with good trees arcing above,
well-leafed already, mixed new plantings with old alder, ash, yew,
elm and oak. Scrub too, dense as hessian, between us and the river,
until a fortuitous break revealed the canoeist in his Stetson, rowing
purposefully against the flow, serene and capable, his back straight
as a good pine, his hands deft and secure, his oar-strokes clipped
and definite.
His fisherman’s quick eye
And turned observant back
We
returned to Kilrea and crossed its many arched-bridge into Antrim,
before once more turning south, the river on our right hand now, to
seek the culinary delights of India in Heaneyland. That evening, we
feasted on pakoras, bhajis, curries, nans, rice and raita at the Taj
Restaurant in Magherafelt. We ate with a friend and talked about
families, hiking, mutual friends, mountains and hills at home and
abroad, leisure, work and the pleasures of living in Heaneyland.
Where
the sally tree went pale in every breeze,
where
the perfect eye of the nesting blackbird watched,
where
one fern was always green
Joan Cavender, an old friend now
dead, gave us Field Work
by Seamus Heaney in 1979, the year of its publication, when we, all
three, worked together in The Gambia. Heaneyland is far from those
Sahel shores, yet the heat of west Africa rises from the pages,
almost sepia now, while the ebony-inked words still beam solid from
the paper.
We returned to our north-west city.
We returned the hired car. We returned to our lives of work and
leisure. We returned our Field Work
to the shelf, where it sits amongst
others of The Poet’s works, the milk and honey of Heaneyland.
We were refreshed and enlivened, replete with memories of places,
people and words.
And of time well spent together.
The way we are living,
timorous or bold,
will have been our life.
©Dave Duggan 2017
Field Work: Seamus Heaney; Faber and Faber, London, 1979
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