irish writers francis ledwidge

Of all the men who went to their deaths on the western front in the first World War, none carried with him a greater love of home than Francis Ledwidge, and the home that he thought of was Slane in County Meath.

In a letter from France to the writer Katharine Tynan he wrote of how he heard the rods calling, and the hills and the rivers, wondering where he was. It was terrible, he added, to be always homesick. 'You are in Meath now, I suppose,' he wrote to her another time. 'If you go to Tara, go to Rath-na-Ri and look all around you from the hills of Drumconrath in the north to the plains of Enfield in the south, where Allen Bog begins, and remember me to every hill and wood and ruin, for my heart is there. If it is a clear day you will see Slane blue and distant. Say I will come back again surely, and maybe you will hear pipes in the grass or a fairy horn and the hounds of Finn - I have heard them often from Tara.

A few weeks later he was dead, his body blown to bits by a German shell as, with some other soldiers, he was building a road on the outskirts of ypres near the Belgium village of Boesinghe. His remains were buried close by, in what they call the Artillery Wood cemetery.