A-Z Blogging Challenge - S is for Skelleen

 Skelleen is a village in Connemara, County Galway. Well, no, actually, it isn’t – because I invented it, originally for my Irish Intrigue story, although it also had a few mentions in Irish Secrets and Irish Shadows.

However, it wasn’t a complete invention. In fact, it’s an amalgam of a couple of Irish villages. Although I knew where I wanted Skelleen to be situated, I needed it to be somewhat larger than the village in that position which has a population of only about 200. So I ‘combined’ it with another larger village (actually in County Mayo).

The advantage of doing this, of course, is that you can ‘move’ buildings around to suit your story! By the time I finished Irish Intrigue, I had a clear picture in my mind of ‘my’ village, even though it was drawn from two different sources. The pub (Connolly’s) in my story came from the Galway village, the church from the other. The ‘Now and Forever’ house in the story was a figment of my own imagination – but the idea came from The Quiet Man cottage in the Mayo village, where we saw Maureen O’Hara’s signature in the guest book (and if you’ve read Irish Intrigue, you’ll understand the significance of that!).

Blending factual places with your own imagination can be useful because you have carte blanche to add/delete whatever you wish. For instance, I added a children’s playground at one end of the village, and the children’s school wasn’t anything like the schools in either of the villages. But there was a bridge spanning the point where a small river reaches the head of the lough, which I called Skelleen Lough.

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