To harassed travellers the road from Castledawson to Toome-bridge is a bottleneck nuisance between Derry and Belfast, but to Seamus Heaney — and those who know and love his work — it is a journey through the imaginative hinterland of the Nobel prize-winning poet.

Which is why Heaney has taken the side of opponents to a scheme to build a four-lane dual carriageway through the heart of the wetlands of South Derry, which would ease congestion for the estimated 15,000 cars that travel the route every day but would shatter the calm of this rural idyll.

Heaney has written to Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland Secretary, to voice his concerns about the scheme and its impact on the unspoilt wetlands bordering Lough Beg.

In the letter, which has not been made public, he expresses his fears that a valuable “lung” would be destroyed. The wetlands are a feature of many of his earlier works, including The Strand at Lough Beg, an elegy to Colum McCartney, a cousin murdered by loyalists, in which he writes of “the lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg/ Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew”.

The poem continues: “There you used to hear guns fired behind the house/ Long before rising time, when duck shooters/ Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,/ But still were scared to find spent cartridges,/ Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,/ On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.”

Heaney grew up on a small-holding in the townland of Mossbawn, a few miles south of loyalist Castledawson. He moved to Tamlaghduff, outside nationalist Bellaghy, when he was 15 and his father inherited a larger farm of 44 acres.

He was fond of duck-shooting on the lough. The countryside and its intimate relationship with the sometimes divided community that lives there played a formative role in Heaney’s poetic vision. In The Old Team he records his grandfather’s role in Moyola Football Club, the first team to win the Irish Cup in 1881.

Lady Moyola, widow of James Chichester-Clark, a former Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, is at the forefront of the campaign. “He [Heaney] was one of the first people I got in touch with. He was horrified to hear about the plans,” she told the Irish News.

Gerry Donnelly, a local resident, said that the Government’s preferred route was published last month. He said that the view from his kitchen across the strand to Church Island, made famous by Heaney, would be obscured if the road was built. “We haven’t got much of this kind of countryside left. You should see it in the winter time when the swans and lapwings are here.”

He hopes that Heaney’s intervention will be a catalyst for more voices of opposition.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Regional Development said that a public inquiry would be held only if there was sufficient opposition to the scheme. Otherwise the road would be built next year.

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