Ten years on from the writer’s death, the simple Sligo cottage in which he worked still stares out to sea
Dermot Healy close to his home in Ballyconnell West, Co Sligo : The rock-filled gabions that kept the sea back from his and Helen's property needed regular maintenance. Photograph: Alan Betson, where the greening of the reedbeds is in full sway. The constant showers, punctuated by intense, brief bursts of heat, have brought forth dazzling clumps of fluffy white bog cotton the size of summer clouds.
Walking the beach, I’d stop for a neighbourly chat while he used a set of pliers to fix the wire ties needed to assemble the gabions by hand in the perishing cold, and then manhandle heaps of stones to cram into them. With hindsight, I wonder now if this coastal remediation work, and how industriously Dermot applied himself to it, had in common with his writing the challenge of placement.
At such times, the briny torrents became a destructive emulsion of seawater and churning stones that made tatters of the beach, pummelled holes in the embankment, smashed gabions open, tore up the roadway and came to rest in mountainous heaps of stones scattered across the road and fields chock-a-block with seaweed, marine debris, crab and lobster shells and the occasional fish.
According to Dermot, he’d bought the cottage at night. The contract with the seller signed in the dark by the light of a match. Conditions were basic and rooms hard to heat. Solid fuel fires were the primary source of comfort. But from the front door there was an unsurpassable view: a blissful panorama of purple mountains and blue sea and variegated coastal hinterlands as beautiful and appeasing as the sea behind his house was wild and threatening.
His relationship with this stretch of coast finding its sweetest and fullest expression perhaps in A Fool’s Errand. A poetry collection rejoicing in and puzzling over the annual spectacle of the migrant barnacle geese. Each year, from October to April, in the morning and again at nightfall, like celestial clockwork, the winter visiting barnacle geese overflew his iron-roofed cottage. They winged between the mainland and Inishmurray Island, their sea-surrounded nocturnal refuge 6km off the coast.
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