4M high Stainless Steel sculpture at the Seamus Heaney Homeplace, Toome Eelworks.

Seamus Heaney became fascinated with eels and eel fishermen when he began visiting his wife Marie’s family at Ardboe, on the shores of Lough Neagh. He took inspiration from the Eelworks at Toomebridge – the most productive wild eel fishery in Europe – for his poem ‘A Lough Neagh Sequence’.

My ‘EELS’ artwork sits next to where the eels are harvested, on their return from their migration between Mid Ulster and the western Atlantic, a journey, which had enthralled Heaney.

‘At Toomebridge where it sluices towards the sea

They’ve set new gates and tanks against the flow.’

– A Lough Neagh Sequence, Door into the Dark

photo: by kind permission of the Seamus Heaney Homeplace at Bellaghy Northern Ireland.