The stories are already here
What is already here
These stories are sitting there waiting to be brought to life.
None of it is invented. It is on council signage, in the annals and in the ground, and fourteen of these sites already sit on a pilgrim trail the council funds. What none of it has ever had is somebody to adapt it, give it a face, and put it somewhere people actually meet it.
That is the whole argument. Nobody travels for a fact on a plaque. They travel for something that already means something to them. Make people care about a place and they will come and stand in it.
And half of what is on that map is a business, so this is not only a children’s slate. The same work that turns a carved stone into a character turns a founding date into a film.
- Devenish
- A saint whose name means flame, and four carved heads at the top of the tower facing four directions.
- Belleek Pottery
- Throwing on the same site since 1857, on a 999-year lease at fifty pounds a year, started to give famine-hit tenants work. A 168-year origin story almost nobody has been told.
- White Island
- Eight carved figures, found bricked into a wall by masons who used them as ordinary building stone. One was never finished and has no face.
- The Boatyard Distillery
- The first legal distillery in Fermanagh since 1890. That sentence is a film on its own.
- Boa Island
- Inis Badhbha, the island of a war goddess. Two Iron Age figures stand back to back and nobody can explain them.
- Crom
- A pair of yews nearly four hundred years old, with parties of two hundred dining under the branches in the 1800s.
- Enniskillen
- Inis Ceithleann. Named for a woman who was wounded, swam to the island and died there.
- Lough Erne Heritage
- Rebuilding the wooden cot, the flat-bottomed boat that carried these islands for a thousand years. One of them was the first man in fifty years to build one.
- Castle Caldwell
- A fiddler fell off a barge and drowned in 1770. The stone they put up still warns fiddlers off the water.
- The resorts
- Five stars on a six-hundred-acre peninsula, domes in a forest, a marina at Killadeas. Beautiful places with no story attached to the booking.
- Share Discovery Village
- Leads the island on getting people with disabilities out on the water, which is a better film than anything in their brochure.
01
Origin films
Weeks, not years. Same research, same locations, same crew as the series.
02
Campaign work
For the region and for the businesses in it, carrying the same world.
03
On-site experience
The characters where the story happened, so the visit and the screen feed each other.
04
Something to sell
A hotel with a story charges differently from a hotel with a view.
The budget used to decide what got made.Now the story does.
The thing that gets a family into the car is not the ruins.It is whatever their five-year-old is obsessed with.
Who knows these characters?
A smaller one, for the very young
Ernie is an otter on Lough Erne.
Every animal beside him actually lives here: the grey heron, the kingfisher, the great crested grebe, the Irish hare, Daubenton’s bat, and the Sandwich terns that come back to the same island every year from the far side of the world. The round tower behind them is Devenish. Four passes at one frame, same cast, four different hands.
The story
A ferryman’s family on Devenish.
They are the erenaghs. Their inherited job, and this is documented, was to keep the church and to give hospitality to pilgrims, strangers and poor travellers.
Meet the family
Three formats, so it runs for years
01
Island episodes
They cross to a real island and whatever lives there gives up its story. It takes the audience somewhere they can go and stand.
02
Ferry house episodes
Somebody arrives at the door off the water and the family’s oath says they take them in. Warm, contained, cheap to make.
03
Bedtime episodes
Donn tells the old tales and writes the children into them as the heroes. The animation changes style completely. This is the valve that makes the show infinite.
One network, six counties
Start on the lough. Every county has its own seam.
Separate shows, one world. Characters cross between them, and a family that follows one ends up travelling to all six.
Where this lands
Children’s media is the most underrated tourism engine there is.
Adults choose destinations. Children choose them harder. A child who loves a show about a place will campaign to be taken there, the parents will go, they will stay two nights instead of one, and they will buy the toy.
Game of Thrones already proved this works here. A decade of filming turned hedgerows and a few quarries into destinations people crossed the planet for. That argument is won. It was also somebody else’s show, commissioned elsewhere, owned elsewhere, and finished in 2019. The locations are still here and the story stopped.
A property that belongs here and keeps releasing renews its own attractions every season, and the region keeps the rights, the merchandise and the next commission.
Written once, released in nine shapes
These are the assets that come out of it.
Series television
Broadcast and streaming length, built for a season arc.
Micro-drama
Vertical, minutes long, made for the feed rather than the schedule.
YouTube
The home channel. Where a pre-school audience actually lives.
TikTok and Reels
Short cuts that carry characters to an audience that never went looking.
Brand films
Origin stories for the distilleries, potteries and hotels already here.
Advertising
Campaign work for the region and for the businesses in it.
Visitor experience
The same characters on site, so the screen and the visit feed each other.
Events and exhibition
Touring shows, festival tie-ins and museum rooms given motion.
Merchandising
The soft toy, the book, the lunchbox. Licensing income stays in the region.
Nobody knows a place like the people who grew up in it.That is who should be writing this.
Built by people who live here
The work stays where the stories came from.
Northern Ireland has a deep creative talent pool and a lot of it is already working in animation and post. We want writers and artists who live in these counties adapting their own folklore, not a studio somewhere else interpreting it from a summary.
And it is not only screen work. Somebody has to build the visitor centre, the exhibition and the trail, and somebody has to make the boats. Those things stay standing long after a shoot would have wrapped, and the joiners, makers, musicians and voices who build them already live in these counties.
