Heaney’s heartland hit by four-lane motorway

The childhood home and land which inspired Seamus Heaney is to have a motorway built through it in a project made possible by DUP Brexit money.

Yesterday in the Court of Appeal, environmentalist Chris Murphy lost his bid to change the planned route of the four-lane A6 motorway between Belfast and Londonderry, which will run yards from the farm of the Nobel laureate poet and will cut across the largest freshwater wetland in the British Isles. Heaney, who died in 2013, described the plan as “desecration”.

Mr Murphy, who is broadly supported by the international literary community, intends to appeal to the Supreme Court.