“My Father Worked with a Horse-plough”: Tales of Rural Ulster

We invite you to join Liam Corry, curator at National Museums NI, and Kathryn McCance, Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again, this Heritage Week as they share poems and stories of 1940s, rural Ulster on Saturday 15th at 2pm at the Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again exhibition.

Seamus Heaney grew up on a farm where they picked potatoes by hand, dug turf for fuel, slept next to the stable under a thatch roof and his father “worked with a horse plough” (‘Follower’). When Heaney started to write in his twenties, he found that he had a “deposit of experience” that had been almost “hermetically sealed” and was able to preserve in words the bygone traditions and practises of the rural Ulster community. In our talk, Liam Corry will share how agriculture changed from manual to mechanised, and how the rituals of the home evolved, all accompanied by readings from Heaney’s agricultural poems.