The fishermen of Lough Neagh make their living from eels - ugly, slimy and oddly exotic, writes Nuala Haughey
The lough will claim a victim every year.
It has a virtue that hardens wood to stone.
There is a town sunk beneath its water.
It is the scar left by the Isle of Man.
- Seamus Heaney,
A Lough Neagh Sequence - 7 Poems http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/17kvq
I grew up near the shores of Lough Neagh. The freshwater lake is home to one of the biggest commercial wild-eel fisheries in western Europe, but to me it was an unremarkable expanse of water where we swam in the summer, fearful that we would be sucked into huge holes caused by sand dredging. Other children had died that way, we were warned, as we waded out from the grassy foreshore, which was dotted with cowpats.
Oddly, we never ate eel in our house, although on Fridays we sometimes had pollan, another fish indigenous to the lough. As a teenager I studied Seamus Heaney's seven poems from A Lough Neagh Sequence, dedicated to the fishermen. I shuddered at the image of a youth standing in the midst of a "jellied road" of eels crossing land.
Like many people I developed prejudices against eels, a much stigmatised fish. Slimy, ugly, slippery snake-like creatures. But although I was repulsed I was also attracted by the exoticism of their life cycles: the long journeys from their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea, between the Azores and the Caribbean, to the shores of my native Lurgan, in Co Armagh, carried across the Atlantic Ocean by the Gulf Stream. About 14 years later, after they have turned from brown to silver, they leave the lough, when the moon is in its dark phase, to spawn and die in that same salt water.
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