For many years poetry was my cultural blind spot. I’m not going to blame this on my own literary failings, of course, but on a secondary schoolteacher who failed to convey his own joy of verse to a room of semi-comatose 16-year-olds.

You can imagine how thrilled I was to receive no fewer than five separate copies of Seamus Heaney’s The Spirit Level for my birthday in 1996, a bestseller at the time given that the Nobel Prize had just come his way. Twenty years later, still largely poetry averse, I visited the newly opened Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy, Co Derry. A recording of Prince Charles (as he then was) reading The Shipping Forecast unexpectedly drew me in: “Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea: Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux”. This “sibilant penumbra” of weather stations around Ireland and Britain had been roll-called from the radio every day of my childhood, and something ignited. Shamefully late, I finally began to understand the magic of poetry.

As a sea lover, all these maritime locations with their weather fronts “rising slowly” were a source of constant fascination. Growing up in Co Limerick, Malin Head, the most northerly point of Ireland, was especially exotic given the distance between these two points on the map. Back then, I don’t think I had ever met anybody who had been to Donegal, so it was a welcome surprise to marry someone totally smote with this far-flung county, and many journeys north ensued. Dunfanaghy became a favourite destination, Gweedore and Glencolmcille too, but somehow Malin Head remained elusive.

One night over dinner, a Donegal friend began listing the Inishowen Peninsula’s many highli