I wrote the first part of this poem when I was 16. The Grianan is a circular stone fort on a hilltop near Inishowen in Donegal. Probably built before 800AD. It has a most commanding position, giving a view of the entire surrounding countryside. Its impressive construction expresses something of the culutre of the people who built it so long ago. The past seems close.

I read about it as a teenager but didn’t go there till I was in my twenties and then not intentionally. I was clambering over the hilly terrain with a colleague when he mentioned casually that we were on the Grianan. I wrote the second part at that time.

But I always felt I had not got the ending quite right so I never attempted to publish the poem. I re-visited it from time to time but the ending eluded me. It was nearly there, but not quite.

It was fifty years from the first poem when I suddenly realised what I had been holding back and also how to integrate my personal experience into a wider communal one.

Then I looked for a publishing opportunity somewhere whose judgement and values I respected. And that was Pennine Platform.