Northern Ireland Literary Trail: CS Lewis, Seamus Heaney & Beyond

Northern Ireland has produced a quantity of major writers entirely out of proportion to its size. Two Nobel-adjacent figures (Seamus Heaney won; CS Lewis arguably should have). A wealth of poets, novelists, and playwrights whose work has shaped English-language literature. And a landscape so dramatic, so saturated with myth and story, that it seems to demand being written about.

This is a literary trail through the places that made the writers and the writers who made the places. You can drive it in a few days. You’ll want longer.

Belfast: CS Lewis and the Wardrobe

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898, in a semi-detached house on Dundela Avenue in the eastern suburbs. He left for England as a young man and spent most of his life in Oxford and Cambridge, but Belfast and the hills around it never left his imagination. The green hills of County Down, visible from his childhood home, became the landscape of Narnia. The wardrobe was real — carved by Lewis’s grandfather, it still exists.

CS Lewis Square

In the Connswater area of East Belfast, CS Lewis Square features a collection of bronze sculptures depicting scenes from The Chronicles of Narnia: the wardrobe, the Stone Table, Aslan, Mr. Tumnus, and the White Witch. The sculptures are beautifully made — large-scale, detailed, and set in an open public space that children can climb on and explore. It’s the kind of literary memorial that works because it invites engagement rather than reverence.

The square sits on the Connswater Community Greenway, a walking and cycling path that traces the rivers of East Belfast. From here, you can walk to many of the sites associated with Lewis’s childhood.

The Lewis Trail, East Belfast

A marked walking trail through East Belfast connects the key sites: Lewis’s birthplace on Dundela Avenue, the family’s second home “Little Lea” on Circular Road, St. Mark’s Church (where his grandfather was rector and where Lewis was baptised), and Campbell College (where he briefly and unhappily attended school). The trail is about 3 miles and takes 1-2 hours depending on pace and contemplation time.

Little Lea is the most important site. The large red-brick house — with its long corridors, attic rooms, and endless books — became the model for the Professor’s house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lewis wrote that the house was “almost a major character in my story” and that its many rooms and passageways fed his childhood imagination.

The Holywood Hills

Lewis attributed his longing for beauty — what he called Sehnsucht or “joy” — partly to the view from his nursery window of the Holywood Hills across Belfast Lough. These green, rounded hills still look much as they did in 1900. You can walk them today and see what the boy saw: the gentle Irish hills under changing Atlantic skies, promising something just beyond reach. It’s easy to understand how they became the hills of Narnia.

Seamus Heaney HomePlace, Bellaghy

If there is a single essential stop on a Northern Ireland literary trail, it is the Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy, County Londonderry. This is the interpretive centre dedicated to the Nobel Prize-winning poet, opened in 2016, a year after his death. It is superb.

Heaney was born in 1939 at Mossbawn farm, between Castledawson and Toomebridge, the eldest of nine children in a Catholic farming family. The landscape of South Derry — its bogs, fields, rivers, and small towns — became the landscape of his poetry. To read Heaney is to know this place. To visit this place is to read Heaney differently.

The Exhibition

The HomePlace presents Heaney’s life and work through a permanent exhibition that is thoughtful, personal, and deeply moving. Original manuscripts, personal belongings, audio recordings of Heaney reading his own work (his voice is unforgettable — deep, musical, County Derry), and interactive displays that connect the poems to the places that inspired them.

The building itself is fine — designed by Belfast architects and built with materials that echo the local vernacular. It sits at the edge of Bellaghy village, modest and right-sized.

The Heaney Landscape

From Bellaghy, you can drive a circuit through the landscape that appears in Heaney’s poetry. The bog at Lough Beg — the “Strand at Lough Beg” of one of his most powerful poems. Anahorish, the townland whose name he translated as “place of clear water.” Toome, where the River Bann widens and where Heaney sets several poems about archaeology and deep time.

This is quiet, flat, agricultural country — not dramatic in the way of the Causeway Coast or the Mournes. Its beauty is subtler: the quality of the light, the textures of the land, the sense of deep habitation. Heaney saw all of this and gave it back to us transformed.

Practical details: The HomePlace is open Tuesday to Sunday (closed Monday). Allow at least 90 minutes. The café is good. Bellaghy is about an hour from Belfast, about 40 minutes from Derry/Londonderry.

Derry/Londonderry: Poets and Playwrights

Derry has an extraordinary literary tradition for a city of its size. The list includes Seamus Deane, Brian Friel, Jennifer Johnston, and a current generation of writers and poets who continue to draw on the city’s complex history and fierce identity.

Brian Friel

Brian Friel, arguably Ireland’s greatest playwright after Synge and Beckett, was born in Omagh but raised in Derry and set many of his plays in the fictional town of Ballybeg — a thinly veiled Derry/Donegal borderland. “Translations” (1980), his masterpiece about language, colonialism, and the mapping of Ireland, is set in a hedge school in Baile Beag. “Dancing at Lughnasa” draws on his childhood in Derry and Donegal.

The city’s walls, which you can walk in their entirety, provide the stage for understanding how Derry’s enclosed, contested geography shaped its writers. See the Derry/Londonderry city guide for the full walking route.

Seamus Deane and the Bogside

Seamus Deane grew up in the Bogside, and his novel “Reading in the Dark” (1996) is one of the finest fictional accounts of growing up in Northern Ireland during the mid-20th century — a Bildungsroman set against the backdrop of sectarian division, family secrets, and the intense, claustrophobic intimacy of a small community. Walking the Bogside today, past the murals and the old terraced streets, you’re walking through Deane’s territory.

The Brontë Connection: Drumballyroney

Patrick Brontë — father of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne — was born Patrick Brunty in a two-room cottage at Emdale, Drumballyroney, County Down, in 1777. He grew up in rural Ulster poverty, was educated locally, and eventually won a place at Cambridge, changed his name, and became the rector of Haworth in Yorkshire, where his daughters wrote the novels that changed English literature.

The Brontë Homeland Interpretive Centre at Drumballyroney tells this story. The original Brunty cottage is gone, but its site is marked, and the surrounding landscape — the small fields, the church where Patrick’s father was sexton, the hills of Upper County Down — gives you a tangible connection to the family’s origins. Patrick Brontë carried this landscape with him to Yorkshire, and scholars have traced its influence on the wild moors of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.

Practical details: Located near Rathfriland, about 40 minutes south of Belfast in the foothills of the Mourne Mountains. Free entry.

More Literary Northern Ireland

The Ulster Folk Museum

The Folk Museum at Cultra, on the road between Belfast and Bangor, preserves the rural and small-town life that shaped so many Northern Irish writers. Reconstructed cottages, farms, schools, and churches — the physical world of Heaney’s childhood, Friel’s Ballybeg, and Lewis’s County Down. It’s invaluable context for anyone interested in the literature. The museum is part of the best things to do in Belfast itinerary.

The Linen Hall Library, Belfast

Belfast’s oldest library, founded in 1788, occupies a handsome building on Donegall Square opposite City Hall. Its Irish and Local Studies collection is extraordinary — a trove of political, literary, and cultural material that includes one of the most important collections of material relating to the Troubles. Writers have used this library for generations. It’s open to visitors and retains the atmosphere of a working, living literary institution.

Sam Thompson and Working-Class Belfast

Sam Thompson, whose play “Over the Bridge” (1960) confronted sectarianism in the Belfast shipyards, represents a tradition of working-class writing that is sometimes overlooked in literary tourism. The play was initially banned by the Group Theatre board, prompting a censorship controversy. It eventually premiered to packed houses. Thompson’s Belfast — the industrial, working, divided city — is as much a literary landscape as the pastoral countryside.

Contemporary Scene

Northern Ireland’s contemporary literary scene is vigorous. Anna Burns won the 2018 Booker Prize for “Milkman,” set during the Troubles in an unnamed city unmistakably based on Belfast. Jan Carson, Lucy Caldwell, and Bernie McGill are among the current generation exploring Northern Irish identity with intelligence and originality. Belfast’s literary festivals, bookshops, and readings keep the tradition alive and evolving.

Planning the Literary Trail

Duration: A thorough literary trail takes 3-4 days. A focused version hitting Lewis in Belfast and Heaney in Bellaghy can be done in two days.

Route: Start in Belfast (CS Lewis sites, Linen Hall Library, Ulster Folk Museum), drive northwest to Bellaghy (Heaney HomePlace), continue to Derry/Londonderry (Friel, Deane), and loop south through Drumballyroney (Brontë) on the return.

Combining interests: The literary trail passes through some of Northern Ireland’s best landscapes. Combine Bellaghy with a night in the Sperrins, or Drumballyroney with a hike in the Mournes. The Troubles history guide provides essential context for understanding the political landscape that shaped so many of these writers.

Best bookshops: No Name Club and Keats & Chapman in Belfast. Little Acorns in Derry. The HomePlace bookshop in Bellaghy for the definitive Heaney collection.

The land made the writers. The writers remade the land. Walk both.