Leonora Thornber ('Miss Yorkshire') and her prince at the Rosapenna

Browsing under 'Donegal' on the BBC Genome site, and here's another interesting one from 13th August, 1927  -

Our Saturday Short Story : Miss Leonora Thornber, ' Lyam O'Lannichan 'THE lovely coast of Donegal, between the sandhills and the sea, is the scene of many of Miss Thornber's short stories, including the one that she will read this afternoon.

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On the internet, you can run with a lead (except if there's a dog on the end of it. Anyway . .) and so we're off to 'Seven Miles of Steel Thistles' (nice name), the blog of Katherine Langrish, writer of fantasy novels for children and young adults. She is the grand-daughter of Leonora - "She was born in 1892 and her name was Emmeline Mary Sherwood [seems like it could have been Yorkshire], though everyone called her ‘Linnie’.  She showed early promise as a writer.  

No more than today, of course, could one rely upon making a living from writing.  Linnie trained and worked for Underwood’s as a demonstration typist – a useful skill for a writer, and one that opened the path for her to work as personal secretary to the Earl of Leitrim in County Donegal.  For propriety’s sake she stayed not at the big house, but in a Rosapenna hotel owned by the Earl, where she was known to all by the nickname ‘Miss Yorkshire’.  Here a visiting Malaysian prince, the son of the Sultan of Johor, proposed to her but was rejected - Linnie was already engaged to my grandfather, William Lucas Thornber (also of Yorkshire farming stock), who earned his living as one of the early breed of motor mechanics.
Once married and with children, Linnie began writing stories and poems as a way of augmenting the family income.  She also wrote plays for the Sheffield Repertory Theatre – the first, ‘Grey Ash’ (a supernatural shocker about an accursed violin) was broadcast by the BBC, and after that several more of her plays were broadcast, and she was recorded reading one of her stories on air. How I'd love to track it down! 

[from - http://steelthistles.blogspot.ie/2010/03/my-grandmothers-books.html]

Wonder does Donegal Library have any of her stories?

Katherine Langrish - her grandmother wrote about Donegal

'Ballylenon' on the BBC airwaves

This somehow passed me by until I came across it today while looking at the BBC's Genome Project, great resource -

Ballylenon is a radio situation comedy set in a small village in County Donegal in Ireland in the 1950s. The six series totalling 30 half-hour episodes were originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 from 1994 until 1999. The series was written by Christopher Fitz-Simon, and it starred T. P. McKenna, Stella McCusckerand Margaret D'Arcy. A seventh series was broadcast in 2009 and 2010.

In July 1995 the plug for the second series was -

Already divided over the proposed demolition of an 18th-century court house to make way for the Swilly Arms' car park, the town's Development Association seems set for open confrontation.

Sound familiar? :-)

And now for what may be an unrelated pic -