Seamus Heaney and the Bogs
Image Credit: National Museum of Ireland
Join us at Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again for a celebration of Bog Day 2026!
This year, we are delighted to welcome Dr Patrick Roycroft, Curator of Geology of the National Museum of Ireland, to speak on the landscape that inspired Heaney’s poetry across his lifetime, from his admiration of his father turf cutting in Digging, to his praise of bogs as Ireland's mythological landscape in Bogland, to the troubling portents of violence in The Tollund Man. From Giant Elks to preserved butter to bog bodies, the bogs provided a treasure trove of inspiration for the poet.
Interspersed with poetry readings, discover the natural history behind the poetry, including when and why the bogs formed in Ireland, the marvels preserved within them, and what Ireland was like before the bogs even came to be.
Dr Roycroft joined the National Museum of Ireland as curator of geology in 2022. Prior to that, he had a varied career: a professional genealogist at the Irish Family History Centre, editor of the online genealogy magazine Irish Lives Remembered, and on the editorial team of the international geology magazine Elements. Roycroft has worked as a tour guide and researcher with Ingenious Ireland and spent over a decade with the H.W. Wilson Company (writing abstracts and indexes). However, he has always been a geologist at heart: he holds a PhD in geology from University College Dublin and a B.A.(Mod.) degree in geology from Trinity College Dublin. He has published in peer-reviewed and in popular journals, wrote the popular geology book 648 Billion Sunrises: A Geological Miscellany of Ireland, and narrates a YouTube video on the mineral variety cotterite. Dr Roycroft enjoys collaborating with the arts and humanities.
Tuilleadh
