Poet Seamus Heaney is opposing a motorway near Lough Beg where swans thrive, writes Carissa Casey.
WB Yeats immortalised the wild swans of Coole and now Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney has joined a campaign to save a rare breed of swans at Lough Beg in Co Derry, an area that has inspired some of his best-loved poems.
Heaney has written to the Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Hain, outlining his objections to a proposed dual carriageway being built through the wetlands bordering Lough Beg, as part of an upgrade to the Belfast-Derry road. In the letter, he describes his deep love for the ancient boglands and expresses his fear that a valuable "lung" will be destroyed.
"The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg/Church Island's spire, its soft treeline of yew." So Heaney described the area in his early poem, The Strand of Lough Beg.
Environmental campaigners claim the locality will be destroyed by the planned motorway, which will carry 15,000 cars a day. It has already been damaged by a red diesel spill into the lake two weeks ago. "I am very, very happy to write occasionally to the people involved and the Department of the Environment. That part of the country does mean a lot to me, especially its remoteness," said Heaney.
"The swans are very much an extremely important element down there. If Galway City Council was going to run a motorway near the swans at Coole Park, there would be an international outcry. But I suppose these swans are just Lough Beg swans.
"I would want to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins on this: 'long live the leaves and wilderness yet'."
Heaney grew up in the area and many of his poems - Moyola, Castledawson, Anahorish and Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road - were inspired by the landscape of his youth. As a boy, he enjoyed duck-shooting on the lake.
In The Strand of Lough Beg, he writes: "There you used to hear guns fired behind the house/ Long before rising time, when duck shooters/ Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes/ But still were scared to find spent cartridges,/ Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,/ On your way across the strand to fetch the cows."
This week, Heaney said: "I had few ecological concerns when I was a lad, but given the actual condition I couldn't help respond. More recently I did become more commonly aware of the actual beauty of the landscape and the wetlands.
"My feeling was that when I saw the possible direction of the motorway I thought there was an alternative possibility to take it though an old aerodrome where there is an industrial estate and so on, which wouldn't be as much of a wound on the ecology."
Lady Moyola, the widow of James Chichester-Clarke, a former prime minister of Northern Ireland, is to the forefront of the campaign against the motorway and this week she wrote to Heaney thanking him for his help. She said his support has helped enormously because of his fame. "It means a lot to him, I think," she said. Lady Moyola, who has lived in the area for close to 50 years, believes the campaign against the road may yet win out. "I think there's quite a long way to go," she said. "They [ the Department of Regional Development] are trying to tell us that it's going ahead but there are all sorts of things they haven't got. They're going around with vesting orders but those particular swans are protected by the EU.
"I particularly don't want people to think it's just those birds. It's a wonderful wildlife area. There are a lot of geese there, lapwing, duck and waders. Apparently there's an Irish lizard that's been discovered. I didn't even know we had them." According to Lady Moyola, the lights associated with the proposed motorway will be particularly damaging to all birds. She says there are plenty of other options for the road.
"We're not being as difficult as all that. It's just sacrilege to go through there. They've got to be a little more bending. At the moment they are being what I would call arrogant. It would be so sad if this part of Co Derry lost that lovely bit of countryside."
A spokesperson for the Department of Regional Development said that, depending on the number of objections, a public inquiry could be held into the proposed road. Sinn Féin's Conor Murphy, Minister for Regional Development in waiting, takes office on May 8th.