I was taking the bus from Belfast to Derry to take photographs, and where it, on the motorway, as I suddenly discovered, passes Long Kesh / The Maze there were, shockingly, a series of these observation / shooting posts half buried in the ditches.

I made this picture some years later, and years after that discovered that Heaney had written a very beautiful if also shocking poem with a verse based I suspect on a similar experience; from the collection "North".


NFS. Courtesy of Alan Toner.