What is Celtic romance? Celtic romance is a love story drawn from the myths of Ireland, Scotland and Wales: selkies who shed their skins for the land, the Tuatha Dé Danann and their fairy mounds, the Morrígan choosing a champion, a holy well that opens both ways. Most of it, on this site, is set…
7 min read
Finegas lost the Salmon of Knowledge to a boy’s burnt thumb. Seventeen hundred years later it comes home to Eithne Gallagher’s holy well, and her oath says it stays.
15 min read
The music came from underground. Orla Kavanagh heard it first on Midsummer’s Eve, walking home from the pub in Knocknarea at an hour when the sensible people of County Sligo were in bed and only the foxes and the fools were abroad. She was neither fox nor fool — she was a traditional musician, a…
9 min read
The seal skin was hidden in the chimney of the old croft house on the headland above Achiltibuie, wrapped in oilcloth that had been there so long it had become part of the stonework. Caitriona MacLeod found it on the afternoon she moved in, when the removal of a bird’s nest dislodged a stone that…
11 min read
The concert hall was empty when Ailsa Drummond arrived for the evening rehearsal, which was unusual. The Lyceum Chamber Orchestra did not typically abandon its Tuesday rehearsals, even when the weather turned foul, even when the heating failed, even when the second violins contracted a collective stomach ailment from the sushi restaurant they insisted on…
9 min read
The bells of Saint Elara had been silent for eleven years when Margaux Delacroix arrived to restore them. The church stood at the edge of the village of Briarthorn, where the Somerset levels met the Mendip Hills in a disputed borderland of mist and ancient grievance. It was a building of considerable beauty and even…
10 min read