Baile Eachaidh · Co. Derry
The Heaney village. He's buried in the churchyard. Everything else follows from that.
Bellaghy is a one-street village in south Derry with about a thousand people in it and one of the great literary lives of the twentieth century buried in its churchyard. Seamus Heaney was born on 13 April 1939 at Mossbawn farm a couple of miles outside the village, went to school at Anahorish, won the eleven-plus to St Columb's in Derry, and spent fifty years writing the fields and bogs and place-names of this small parish into poetry that took the Nobel in 1995. He died in Dublin on 30 August 2013. They brought him home and put him under a slab in St Mary's that says "Walk on air against your better judgement." That's the line you came for.
The village itself is short. A long Main Street, a couple of pubs, a chipper, the war memorial, the church up at one end and the Bawn out at the other. Three years after Heaney died, the council took the abandoned police barracks halfway up Main Street and turned it into HomePlace — a literary centre devoted entirely to one poet. It is the best thing of its kind in Ireland. They kept the basalt of the old fort in the new walls, which feels right for a body of work that never let you forget what was underneath.
What you do here: HomePlace in the morning, the Bawn after lunch, Lough Beg in the late afternoon when the light goes flat. Read "The Strand at Lough Beg" before you walk it, or after, whichever way round you prefer your grief. Then you drive to Magherafelt to sleep, because Bellaghy doesn't really do hotels, and that's fine. Come back the next day if there's a reading on.
It is not a tourist village. There is no harbour, no festival every weekend, no coach trade. There is a poet, a fort, a lough, and a churchyard, and most days that is more than enough.