The Poetry House 2024

07/06/2026

Most poetry is an interior experience. You read it alone, in a chair, with the light on. The words do their work inside you, and the physical world outside the window stays largely irrelevant. Seamus Heaney is different. His lines are anchored to specific fields, specific rivers, specific light falling across a specific corner of County Derry, and that specificity is not decorative: it is the whole point. Reading him on the page is one thing. Standing where the words were formed on a Seamus Heaney tour is something else entirely.

A Seamus Heaney tour is not sightseeing in the conventional sense. It is a form of reading the landscape, moving through a living text that Heaney spent a lifetime annotating in verse. This is the philosophy that InSite Tours Ireland operates from, and it changes how every site lands. This guide covers the key locations, the Seamus Heaney tour options currently available, how to choose between them, and the practical details you need to plan your visit to Heaney country with confidence.

Read about how you can enjoy this immersive and wonderful experience at https://insite-tours.com/in-the-footsteps-of-seamus-heaney/

15/09/2024

Please come along to Mayogall AOH Hall, Lavey, Maghera this evening at 7pm to welcome the artistic memorials of the exiled O'Neill and O'Donnell chieftains by local artist Anne McCloy. Everyone welcome!

11/09/2024

There’s ONE WEEK left to apply to our Project Funding for Individuals.

Applicants can apply for support from £3,000 - £10,000 to support costs of creating new work, research and development, individual's time on a project, participation in a residency, mentoring & training or professional development.

Visit https://artscouncil-ni.org/.../project-funding-for... to find out more and to apply.

🗓️Closing date for applications: 12no… See more

10/04/2024

Loving this film with a youthful Seamus Heaney

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney has been judged by Robert Lowell to be the most important Irish poet since Yeats. Melvyn Bragg joins Heaney to look back over He...

09/04/2024

A great listen to Seamus Heaney in 1989 on Desert Island Discs. He remains plain and articulate in his exchange with British establishment shill Sue Lawley. Missing this erudite Irish genius every day. https://youtu.be/bAuucSly7t8?si=Kx86-6x_iQmHHWwq Sadly no rap or hip hop in his music choice.

This week's Desert Island Discs castaway is Seamus Heaney, a Catholic Ulsterman who has been acclaimed by many as the best Irish poet since Yeats. He was rec...

08/04/2024

It is always lovely to come across these archives and to once again appreciate our great Seamus Heaney, fluent and truthful and never losing his Bellaghy integrity or the fruity dialect then peppered with bourgeois nicety. Missed each and every day and always recalled fondly.

An interview with acclaimed and highly respected Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney. Host: John Edwards First shown: 02/04/1980If you would like to lice...

03/09/2023

My off and on homeplace for September as a base for Ireland-wide tours with my friends Tim and Audrey from Milwaukee USA☘️❤️🙏 On Lough Corrib at Oughterard, County Galway😎

03/08/2020

"A giant dies and the world left behind feels a bit more ta**ry and mundane and uninspiring and small. A melancholy descends, filled with insecurity about the present and seductive nostalgia for the certainty of the past. Where have the great leaders gone, one wonders—the great causes and morality, the clarity and vision? The death of the Nobel Prize–winning Irish politician John Hume is such a moment."

Thanks to The Atlantic for this wonderful Eulogy. Rest in Peace John Hume. Peacemaker and Statesman.

22/06/2020

This aerial shot of Bellaghy Bawn was taken in October 2017 and clearly shows the old Bawn itself with its distinctive flanker tower and walled garden to the rear. The house to the bottom right is Craigs and in the yard we see the late Peter Craig's little Honda, waiting for its next run with him and Mary to the shops.

The Bawn was originally built in 1622 during the Plantation of Ulster, as was the street now called Castle Street. Of course, the Plantation was unpopular with the local population, largely displaced from their lands that they had farmed for centuries.

The original building was sacked during the Rebellion of 1641 and only the main part of the house remained, along with the surviving of the two flanker towers. It latterly served as the local GP Clinic with the last resident being the rather eccentric Dr. Thomas, who in her later years shared her kitchen with a tree.

Taken into state care in the 1980s, it underwent a detailed archaeological survey before the old Bawn was transformed into a visitor centre, telling the story of the area and given the blessing of our very own Seamus Heaney, who opened it to the public in 1996.

Regardless of your views on our shared history, it remains shameful that the Bawn has been neglected totally by both local and regional government since it left community ownership in 1998 - now opening for a pitiful two hours every week on a Sunday and a Wednesday (even this is not guaranteed!).

As we move out of the Covid shutdown, now might be the time to reassess the Bawn, including who owns and manages it going forward (and certainly not the current Department for Communities (hopefully the irony in their name does not pass you by), and the part that it can play in the life of our community and the entirety of the Bellaghy Story.

I'd love to have your thoughts!