Seamus Heaney

Castledawson, County Derry, is the birthplace of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize-winning poet who transformed ordinary Northern Irish life into world literature. He was born there in 1939 before his family moved to Bellaghy, yet the fields, farms and memory of that place never left his work. Heaney died in Dublin in 2013 and is buried in Bellaghy, but the clarity of his vision began in the small townland near Castledawson where he first learned to see.