There is a place called An Ceathrú Rua in the Connemara Gaeltacht. It’s lovely. Go there if you ever have the chance. There is a pub called the Realt na Maidine. Actually there are two. The other is called An Cistin. That is, the Morning Star and The Kitchen. The former has actually been around since the 1880s, so it slots nicely into any period story set in the village. I’m not so sure about An Cistin. It might be newer. I have spent more time in the latter because it is closer to the language school where I spent a very pleasant summer some years ago. The Morning Star is further out, but it has such a romantic name it deserves to get mentioned more.

The name of the village does, indeed, mean the Red Quarter, and it is to do with the red coloured heather that is peculiar to the neighbourhood. It thus lends itself to comparison with the red grass of Gallifrey. Of course, the fact that Gallifrey has red grass is an invention of Russell T. Davies in recent years. It never had it before. So I tended to confine it to the valleys. In End of Time, the Master talked about his father’s estates having them on the slopes of Mount Perdition. I will get those into a story eventually. But meanwhile, the red heather of An Ceathrú Rua, a place where the sun goes down on Galway Bay in spectacular fashion, is the setting for a quiet evening for Marion and Kristoph.

The American Wake was an all too familiar practice in Ireland right up until recent years when emigration TO the country from Eastern Europe and even further away began to happen. Young couples would have a party to see them off that was, in every sense, the same as the ‘wake’ given to the dead, because coming home from aboard happened so rarely. It was only when I began writing that section of the story that I realised that there was a comparison to be made with Marion, who went so much further than America to find her new life. Of course, she can come home whenever she wants. She has the Portal. But when I first imagined her going to Gallifrey with Kristoph it was going to be much more of an exile than that, much closer to that of the Irish emigrants depicted here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carraroe
http://www.doilin.com/An_Cheathr__Rua.html