Open Ground Guided Tours Now Available

Seamus Heaney HomePlace has launched a new visitor experience that makes the most of the longer summer days.

Open Ground Guided Tours allow you to journey through the landscape with the assistance of knowledgeable and engaging staff, where you’ll travel on the same lanes, roads and paths that a young Seamus Heaney travelled on.

Open Ground is a unique visitor experience centred on locations that shaped much of Seamus Heaney’s life and literature, from The Strand at Lough Beg to the Moyola River, which allows visitors the opportunity to discover the smells, sights and sounds that make his poetry so uniquely of this place.

While the experience can be completed as a self-guided activity, the new offering adds an extra rich layer to how visitors can interact with the landscape. Through the experienced guides who’ll join you at each site, you’ll hear how each of the five locations held great significance for Seamus Heaney.

Information revealed by the guides will allow those taking part to discover how each of these places, so much a part of Seamus Heaney’s formative years, influenced the rich legacy of his literature, as they share illuminating details and anecdotes around the significance, history and heritage of each unique site.

You’ll leave with a deeper, richer understanding of his poetry and an appreciation for the nature and landscape which so inspired his works.

Happening every Thursday evening at 5:30pm from 7 July 2022 through to the end of August, the tour starts promptly, leaving from the HomePlace foyer. The ticket price of £20 per person includes price of admission to the centre’s ‘Man & Boy’ exhibition, which can be done beforehand. Booking is essential as places on each tour are limited.
For more information go to https://seamusheaneyhome.com/open-ground/