Lottery funding to help showcase Seamus Heaney’s poetry

The Heritage Lottery Fund is to provide £688,700 to showcase and preserve the special places celebrated in the poems of Seamus Heaney.

Mid Ulster District Council has been awarded the funding for a project to showcase the places, sights, sounds and traditional ways of life that Seamus Heaney celebrated in his poems.

During his lifetime Heaney was the world’s best known and best loved poet. His poems accounted for two thirds of book sales of all living poets. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Many of his best known poems are set in his native South Derry. Yet many of this places are inaccessible to the public and traditional ways of life are slowly fading from memory.

The HLF is granting the money to the Living Past Project which that aims to connect Heaney’s great poems to people and communities in the area, to preserve the traditional rural life that inspired Heaney and to make some of the sites that feature in his poems accessible to locals and tourists alike.

There are plans for a literary trail- Heaney made reference to many local sites some of which are not currently accessible to the public. The trail will feature nine of them including Lagan’s Road, Anahorish and the eel fishery at Toome.

There will be children’s activities including a post primary programme connecting his poetry to the landscape.

The project will include elements on rural life, collecting stories and making videos of activities inspired by poems such as Churning Day, Blackberry Picking and The Forge.

Links are also being established with universities and colleges in Ireland, north and south as well as the two universities where Heaney taught Oxford and Harvard.

The project will establish South Derry on the literary map, encourage tourism and boost the local economy.