Backlash to Dual Carriageway Which Tears Through Seamus Heaney's Countryside

Parts of the dual carriageway will run through the village of Anahorish and Mossbawn, Heaney's home until 1953. The poet himself was vocally critical of the proposal, saying in an interview with The Daily Telegraph back in 2007 that "there was an alternative possibility to take the road through an old aerodrome where there is an industrial estate and so on, which wouldn’t be as much of a wound on the ecology.”

Students and professors from Queens Univeristy, Belfast - Heaney's alma mater - have also opposed the construction of the road. Professor Fran Brearton, director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queens, called the decision "short-sighted", saying that it would destroy the landscape and legacy of an area which has become somewhat of a pilgrimage for poetry lovers in recent years.

Despite opposition, no plans have been made to reroute the A6 and construction will begin as early as October.

Here is Heaney's poem "Anahorish" from his 1972 collection, Wintering Out :

My 'place of clear water,'
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass

and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,

after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.
With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills.