Open Ground
Discover locations linking the landscape and literature of Seamus Heaney.
Venture out to Open Ground, a series of five sites which held great significance for Seamus Heaney, and explore how each place, central to his formative years, shaped the rich legacy of his writing. Interpretation panels at each location provide insight into the places you are visiting.
While Open Ground can be explored as a self-guided experience, we also offer Open Ground Guided Tours. Visiting each site with an experienced guide adds a deeper layer of understanding as you will hear directly how each of the five locations influenced Seamus Heaney’s life and work.
Private tours are also available upon request. Please contact us for more information.
Poems rooted in these places
Discover the places that shaped Seamus Heaney’s life and literature — the Eelworks at Toomebridge, Magherafelt, the Moyola River, the Strand at Lough Beg and Bellaghy Bawn — and experience the sights, sounds and smells that make his poetry so uniquely of this place.
Heaney’s roots were in the Bellaghy area and many of his poems are deeply grounded in these places. Throughout his career, he regularly drew inspiration from the loughs, rivers and bogs he visited during his formative years.
Many of these places remain largely unchanged and unspoilt since Heaney wrote about them, allowing you to see them for yourself through the poet’s eyes. Read Heaney’s work in the context in which it was inspired and discover how the landscapes of Open Ground are reflected throughout his writing.
The Strand at Lough Beg
Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’ takes its name from a place where his family’s cattle once grazed. Heaney had fond memories of visiting the Strand with his father at the end of the day to check on the herd.
Lough Beg is a wetland nature reserve where you can watch wildfowl, woodland birds and the seasons come and go – just as Seamus Heaney used to do in one of his favourite places.
‘The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew.’
– The Strand at Lough Beg, Field Work
Moyola River at Castledawson
The fields at Mossbawn, the family farm where Seamus Heaney was born and spent his early years, stretched down to the Moyola River. With the river just half-a-mile from his front door, the young Heaney would often walk along its banks to the stone arches of the railway bridge at Castledawson.
His poem ‘A New Song’ recounts times spent by the water. Follow the riverbank yourself and discover the birds, rocks and trees that inspired Heaney.
‘And stepping stones like black molars
Sunk in the fjord, the shifty glaze
Of the whirlpool, the Moyola
Pleasuring beneath alder trees.’
– A New Song, Wintering Out
The Turfman at Bellaghy Bawn
One of Seamus Heaney’s best-known works, ‘Digging’, compares cutting turf from a bog with the poet’s own labours when writing. It recalls a visit to Heaney’s grandfather while he was cutting turf on Toner’s bog.
The poem and the practice of cutting turf are honoured by David Annand’s sculpture The Turfman. Sculpted in turf then cast in bronze, the statue stands at Bellaghy Bawn as a monument to the power and skill of both the turf-cutter and Heaney’s words.
‘Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sod
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.’
– Digging, Death of a Naturalist
The Eelworks
Seamus Heaney became fascinated with eels and eel fishermen when he began visiting his wife Marie’s family at Ardboe on the shores of Lough Neagh. He took inspiration from the Eelworks at Toomebridge – the most productive wild eel fishery in Europe – for his poem ‘A Lough Neagh Sequence’.
Visit the gates where the eels are harvested and see Malcolm Robertson’s sculpture depicting their migration between Mid Ulster and the western Atlantic – a journey that captivated Heaney.
‘At Toomebridge where it sluices towards the sea
They’ve set new gates and tanks against the flow.’
– A Lough Neagh Sequence, Door into the Dark
Magherafelt
The town nearest to Seamus Heaney’s childhood home was Magherafelt, and its local landmarks are regularly evoked in his poems. Doctor Kerlin, who visits the Heaney home in ‘Out of the Bag’, had his practice on Broad Street.
Magherafelt’s cinema is recalled in ‘Two Lorries’, as is the bus station where Heaney met his mother on his return from St. Columb’s College in Derry. Heaney juxtaposes this meeting with the 1993 bombing of the bus station, which was also a stop on the poet’s bus journey in ‘Route 110’.
‘A revenant on the bench where I would meet her.
In that cold-floored waiting-room in Magherafelt’
– Two Lorries, The Spirit Level
Explore Open Ground
Download our Open Ground app from the App Store or Google Play to hear Seamus Heaney reading his poems in the very places that inspired them, and explore Open Ground through augmented reality experiences.
Make an Enquiry
If you have any questions about the exhibition, an upcoming event or anything else happening at HomePlace, you can write to us or give us a call. We’re here to help.
