Passing Laurel Villa, you’d never suspect it was a Tardis. One has to enter this modestly proportioned house on the outskirts of the County Derry town of Magherafelt to taste its magic. Your first impression is of a beautifully kept bed-and-breakfast house. Then you notice the photographs and paintings lining the walls: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney. There are poems printed on linen, first editions in glass cases. Upstairs you pass the bedroom doors: the Kavanagh Room, the MacNeice Room, the Heaney Room. Laurel Villa is a shrine (though a very unstuffy one) – a genuine House of Poetry. Gerardine Kielt keeps things immaculate, and cooks the best breakfasts in Ireland; Eugene, her husband, organises poetry readings at Laurel Villa, and maintains contact with poets far and wide – including Seamus Heaney himself, the most celebrated and best-read living poet in these islands today.

Heaney, a local boy born on a farm a few miles from Magherafelt, has a great admiration for the Kielts’ love and respect for poetry. So much so that this Nobel Laureate, hugely in demand and fêted all over the world in this year of his 70^th birthday, found the time to come to the unassuming Magherafelt house in June and give a reading in front of an audience of fifty. My wife Jane and I were there; so were Heaney’s brothers, his relations, his local acquaintances. Watching him chat and sign books, joke and clink wine glasses after the reading, you got the measure of a very genuine and grounded man, very pleased to be back on the soil that sprouted all those famous poems.

Joining Eugene Kielt on one of the guided tours he conducts round Seamus Heaney Country, we found the building blocks of Heaney’s young life and his life-long art coming at us round every corner, shining a light on poems that we seemed to have known and loved for ever. At the Hillhead near Magherafelt, Barney Devlin’s forge stood beside the roaring Toome road, the low ‘door into the dark’ exactly as Heaney described it in one of his best-known poems, ‘The Forge’. And there was the 89-year-old Barney himself, ‘90 next Boxing Day!’ An ageless man, full of life and fun (personal motto: ‘You must get up!’), delighted to be so much visited. We leaned against the door jamb and listen to the smith yarn and ring the anvil with his great hammer, as he did at the Millennium hour. He pointed out hearth and bellows, long-redundant tools, a stuffed rooster in the rafters. ‘Dick the fighting cock, champion of Meath!’ Pouring out a none-too-mean measure of whiskey, Barney gave a wicked chuckle and slapped me on the back. ‘I’ve never touched it in my life, but I like a man who takes his drop!’

In the townland of Broagh below the forge, a long-abandoned railway line curved across the lanes. Heaney wrote in ‘The Railway Children’ of climbing its grassy cutting, level with the telegraph poles where ‘words travelled the wires/In the shiny pouches of raindrops’.

How many people wish that Mossbawn, the original thatched house where the poet was born to Patrick and Margaret Heaney in 1939, had not been demolished! But it was, some years ago, and in its place another long, low, modest farmhouse stands beside the Toome road. The McLaughlin family live here now, farming the same fields and milking cows in the same yard as Patrick Heaney did seventy years ago. We looked around the place – the byre, the sheds, the waterlogged field at the back of the house where the Heaney boys put down ‘four jackets for four goalposts’ and played football until the light died:

‘And the actual kicked ball came to them

Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard

Breathing in the dark and skids on grass

Sounded like effort in another world …’

Of all the places we visited, I found Church Island on the shores of Lough Beg the most resonant. The spire stuck up skywards from the massed trees of the island, unapproachable beyond a rain-sodden wetland. Leaning against the ivy-grown road wall, Eugene quietly read us ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’, Heaney’s eulogy for his second cousin Colm McCartney, murdered by sectarian killers in 1975. The backdrop of the poem and the present setting were one and the same: cows in a mist, clays and waters, a soft treeline.

‘ … I dab you clean with moss

Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.

I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.

With rushes that shoot green again, I plait

Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.’

The late afternoon light began to fade. The unvisited locations of Heaney Country would have to wait for another day – Anahorish (‘We were killing pigs the day the Americans arrived’), Bellaghy Bawn, the graveyard where Seamus’s brother Christopher Heaney lies buried near Colm McCartney. ‘I like to think that I belong to these places,’ said Eugene Kielt, steering us back towards Magherafelt, ‘and they belong to me. What Seamus Heaney’s magic is, for me – he can attach a total stranger to these places, and leave that stranger attached to them as strongly as I am myself – these ordinary places that I’ve known all my life.’

Laurel Villa Townhouse

60 Church Street, Magherafelt, Co. Derry BT45 6AW (02879-301459; www.laurel-villa.com) – From £70 dble B&B.

Guided tours of Seamus Heaney Country

Variable length, depending on people’s interest. From £60 pp, transport and copies of poems included; group rates negotiable

Reading (all titles published by Faber & Faber):

Seamus Heaney’s poems:

Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996; The Spirit Level (1996); Electric Light (2001); District and Circle (2006)

Prose:

Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (1980); The Government of the Tongue (1988); The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (1995); Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (2002)

Interviews: Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O’Driscoll (2008)

Listening

‘The Poet and The Piper’ (Claddagh Records 2003): Heaney reads many of his best-loved poems; master musician Liam O’Flynn plays uilleann pipes and whistle

‘Collected Poems’ (RTE Lannan 2009, 15-CD box set): Heaney reads his 11 collections in their entirety

First published in: The Times Click here to view a map for this walk in a new window

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As we came down Hugh Kemp’s drive early in the morning, a red squirrel scuttered across the drive just in front of us. It sat up, cleaning its nose with both front paws, its tail a puff of pale russet smoke, black eyes fixed on us, before diving out of sight between the bars of a cattle grid. ‘Come on in,’ said Hugh at the door of Mirk Pot House. ‘I’m sorry my Jane isn’t here to greet you. Coffee? You’ll have to excuse the clutter. Now, then, these red squirrels of ours …’

The tree planter and red squirrel conserver of Snaizeholme is a Yorkshireman by birth and a landscape artist by talent. He’s also been a practical conservationist throughout his eight decades of life. In 1966 he and his wife Jane found the ruinous farmhouse of Mirk Pot in the hidden dale of Snaizeholme, a cleft tucked into the rolling country to the south of Wensleydale. ‘Our battle plan,’ he says, ‘was to buy a derelict hill farm with some outhouses and a reasonable amount of land. We’d rebuilt the house by 1967, and we started planting trees commercially.’

Christmas trees, Sitka spruce, Japanese larch, sycamores – the Kemps planted the bare fellside enthusiastically, and soon began to notice an increase in bird life. When they fenced off the plantation against grazing sheep and deer, ‘mountain ash, hawthorn, bird cherry, the native trees – they all came back. We got expert advice from the British Trust for Ornithology on how to improve our plantations for wildlife; we clear-felled our Sitka; we created a wildlife corridor with native trees – hawthorn, silver and downy birch, willow, sessile and pedunculate oak, blackthorn. What we ended up with was a very young plantation of broadleaves, and a few big conifers. We were trying to encourage the black grouse to return, but inadvertently we were actually planting for red squirrels.’

It was a local woodsman who first spotted a red squirrel in Snaizeholme, but no-one quite believed him. Then in 1997 there were confirmed sightings, followed by a steady increase in red squirrel numbers. With support from DEFRA and the Forestry Commission, and some expert advice from the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group, Mirk Pot has become a red squirrel refuge. Grey squirrels – introductions to the UK from North America, now crowding Britain’s native reds to extinction all over the country – are baffled by specially designed feeders which provide the red squirrels with their favourite mixture of peanuts, sunflower seeds and pine nuts. The sessile oaks are coppiced, to retain the trees themselves without allowing them to produce the acorns that grey squirrels love.

As we left the house in Hugh’s company, a red squirrel was swinging on the bird feeder in the garden. It jumped down to the wall, ran along the stones, stopped for a scratch, did a double take when it noticed us, and scampered out of sight up the nearest tree. ‘Stone walls,’ mused Hugh. ‘We’ve had half a mile rebuilt – cost us an arm and a leg, but it’s worth it. Red squirrels hate travelling through thick undergrowth, but they use that wall as a motorway.’

We boarded Hugh’s battered blue Land Rover and went bouncing along rough tracks to West Field, near the specially created viewing area. Hugh told us of the parapox disease, sometimes called squirrel pox. Greys are immune to parapox, but can transmit it to the reds, whom it condemns to a slow and horrible death. ‘Even more reason to keep out the greys,’ was Hugh’s crisp summing up.

At the viewing area there was just one red squirrel on show, a pretty little individual that was sitting up on the bench eating peanuts from the feeder. It soon took to the tree-tops, and its colleagues must have been keeping out of our way, because we saw no more. But red squirrels are generally far from shy, it seems, when food is on the agenda. ‘I found one actually in the food bin by our front door,’ recounted Hugh. ‘So I fixed the lid on properly. But when I took it off next morning, blow me if there wasn’t a squirrel sitting in there eating. Now I chain the lid down – but even so, I’ve seen them on their hind legs trying to prise it open with their front paws!’

I found the red squirrels of Mirk Pot wholly delightful. Whatever the cause – and I suspect it has a lot to do with childhood memories of Beatrix Potter’s cheeky, charming Squirrel Nutkin – their energy, inquisitiveness and delicate beauty are quite irresistible. They thrive in Snaizeholme, quite oblivious of what they owe to Hugh and Jane Kemp. But we, at least, can give thanks for this dedicated couple and the invaluable conservation work they are so effectively doing in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales.

FACT FILE

Red squirrels in Snaizeholme (OS Explorer OL2): Access: either on foot via Snaizeholme Red Squirrel Trail (10 miles return walk from Hawes)

(http://www.yorkshiredales.org.uk/index/learning_about/nature_in_the_dales/best_places_to_see/snaizeholme-red-squirrel-trail.htm); or B6255 from Hawes to Widdale Bridge, left up minor road to entrance to Red Squirrel Viewing Area (signed) via Mirk Pot or West Field.

Hugh Kemp leads red squirrel walks, by appointment only (01969-667510).

Further information: Hawes TIC (01969-666210)

Hints: Red squirrels are most active around dawn/dusk and in sunshine after bad weather; their hearing is acute; they’re most likely to be in the treetops. Take binoculars, keep quiet, and stop still if you spot one.

Help and advice

The Wildlife Trusts (01636-677711; www.wildlifetrusts.org) can advise on locating red squirrels across the UK; likewise Natural England (0845-600-3078; www.naturalengland.org.uk), Scottish Natural Heritage (01738-444177; www.snh.org.uk), Countryside Council for Wales (0845-130-6229; www.ccw.gov.uk) and Northern Ireland Environment Agency (www.ni-environment.gov.uk). The Forestry Commission (www.forestry.gov.uk) and the Forest Service of Northern Ireland (www.forestserviceni.gov.uk) are active in conserving red squirrels. The National Trust has developed 5 downloadable Red Squirrel Walks: see www.nationaltrust.org.uk

Red Squirrel Week: 3-11 October 2009. Details: contact The Wildlife Trusts

Reading: Trees and Wildlife in Wensleydale (Mason Bros, Newsagents, Main Street, Hawe, North Yorkshire DL8  3QN – £10 plus postage – tel 01696-667278) is Hugh Kemp’s autobiography.