The poem Follower appeared in Seamus Heaney’s 1966 collection Death of a Naturalist and in it Heaney portrays his father, “An expert”, ploughing, and how he, as a young boy, “stumbled” behind him. Heaney recalls, “All I ever did was follow / In his broad shadow round the farm.”
In this photograph there is a similar dynamic at play; the artist has captured his father, also an expert, taking home a trailer load of turf, cut on a hill in north Donegal, and feels a similar mixture of appreciation and inadequacy.
Although green, the angular trailer does not sit comfortably on the soft curve of the bog road and hints at the often strained relations between the modern and the traditional, the industrial and the rural, the new and the old, children and their parents.
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