A master who used a pen as a spade

A master poet and family man, a Nobel laureate and friend, a guest of royalty and farmer’s son, Seamus Heaney had a life which was a smooth blend of the ordinary and extraordinary.

Reaching the headiest heights of literary genius, the ever-modest everyman insisted his poetry was just part of a chain.

“A written chain; we’ll call it a human chain,” he said last year when he gifted his manuscripts and notes to the National Library of Ireland.