Irish language activist and director of the ULTACH Trust Aodán Mac Póilin wrote in his collected essays Our Tangled Speech, ‘The Irish language named the landscape and if you know the language, the landscape talks back’. Undoubtedly a large majority of our place names in Ulster derive from Gaelic, in this fascinating study the author also explains the derivation of common Ulster place names from Viking, Anglo-Norman, English and Scottish roots, placing them in the context of Ulster history, for example, from the Elizabethan conquest or the Ulster Plantation.
As well as demonstrating the origins of Gaelic place names from ancient kingdoms and peoples, physical features, the built environment such as ring forts and castles, religion and the Irish church, the guide expands to explain root words employed in townlands, towns and Irish land divisions, and shows how the new settlers, especially the landowners had an impact on Ulster place names. There is also a section explaining how these myriad influences impacted our street names, with Belfast used as an example to demonstrate this process in action historically.
Investigation of our place names is an enjoyable and rewarding investigation of our past. Prehistoric sites, early Irish society, past and present landscapes are all there to be discovered. This book provides a guide to the interpretation of place names in Ulster, gives historical background and explains the origins of many of our place names. Place Names in Ulster is a doorway into a hugely interesting subject exploring the richness of our heritage of place names and how these reveal so much about our landscape, people, flora and fauna, and so much else. The guide is a practical research tool that will aid researchers, novices and the more experienced alike, especially those interested in family and local history.
As a small tribute to Dr Bardon, the Foundation would like to produce a new edition of one of his lesser known, but still highly regarded, works. Around 1992 Jonathan turned his attention to place names and the result was a short but incredibly accessible, fascinating and broad-ranging guide. Originally published as Investigating Place Names in Ulster, and subsequently reprinted as Place Names in the North of Ireland this guide is a superb introduction and essential reading for anyone making a foray into the origins of the place names of Ulster.
Review - Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 24, 2024
While this 58-page, A4-size gem of a book is a boon to anyone researching family history in the nine counties of Ulster, it is also an important contribution to improving cross-community understanding. Its strength is its delightful and clear linking of place names with landscapes and history. Jonathan Bardon explores prehistoric sites and early Irish society and traces Gaelic, Viking, Anglo-Norman, English and Scottish roots, threading in, for example, the Elizabethan conquest and the Ulster plantation. He promotes harmony by weaving Irish, English and Scottish into one cloth. The book traces ring forts, kingdoms, trees, houses, churches, civil parishes and so on. It is well laid out with maps and lists. Modern names, some of them hard to pronounce correctly, are given alongside their origins, meanings and continuing spelling changes.
Bardon’s accurate and objective writing won him respect across the spectrum of Ulster’s religious and political groups. When he died in 2020, the tributes to him in the
press from both the general public and historians were impressive. In her foreword, his wife, Carol Tweedale Bardon, explains how she undertook, and enjoyed, the task of producing this new edition of his 1991 Investigating Place Names in Ulster.
The earlier volume drew on the work of Kay Muhr and others at the Northern Ireland Place-Names Project at Queen’s University Belfast and was used as a resource for teachers after the 1989 reforms required all schools to follow the same curriculum. From 1952, the Ulster Place-Name Society had promoted the collection, verification and explanation of names. Some 30 years later, following the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, the project at Queen’s began. In her introduction to this 2020 book, Muhr quips that the study of place names was the closest the British government could get to showing any interest in the Irish language, a situation which, step by step, community groups have succeeded in changing since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Most of the people in Ireland spoke Irish until the early nineteenth century, so, not surprisingly, a majority of Ulster place names are Gaelic, but many are not. For
instance, Bardon says, around 50 per cent of names in County Down are not Gaelic at all. He locates many Irish and Scots place names as Gaelic or Celtic from the people who migrated from ‘between Bohemia and the east bank of the Rhine’ (p. 4), and, as part of his argument, he points to the survival of Celtic place names on the continent and also in England, such as ‘Rhine’, ‘Danube’, ‘Vienna’, ‘Paris’, ‘Lyons’ and ‘London’.
Here are samples from the book’s lists of Gaelic names in Ulster. ‘Fermanagh’ comes from the Irish ‘Fir Manach’, meaning men of Manach, and Bardon adds that
the name ‘was found in Ptolemy’s map as Menapii’ (p. 6). Places with ‘Dun’ come from the word for fort; those with ‘Inver’ from a river mouth; ‘Fintona’ is a fair field
in County Tyrone; ‘Shankill’ means old church; ‘Kilmore’ big church; and ‘Limavady’ means dog’s leap.
Bardon argues that there are only a few Viking names in Ulster: ‘Carlingford’, ‘Olderfleet’, ‘Strangford’, ‘Skerries’ and ‘Ulster’. Two thousand years ago the rulers
were known as Ulaidh, which, Bardon says, is pronounced ‘ully’, rhyming with ‘bully’. The Vikings combined that with the Irish word ‘tír’, meaning land, to get ‘Uladztir’,
which became anglicised as the word ‘Ulster’.
Anglo-Norman names are also rare in Ulster, commonly ending in ‘-ton’ or ‘-town’. The conquerors, who came from the twelfth century onwards, used mostly native
Irish place names with adapted spelling. An interesting example is Twescard, near Bushmills in north County Antrim, which comes from ‘tuaisceart’, meaning north in
Irish. Apart from some medieval Norman names, English place names in Ulster date from the plantation of Protestant English and Lowland Scots dating from the early
seventeenth century. Bardon lists places such as ‘Castleblaney’, ‘Hillsborough’ and ‘Mountstewart’, which are based on landowners’ names. He has a separate section on street names in Belfast, many created during its expansion in the nineteenth century.
This book covers some 350 names, but there are many others. The main and understandable limit is that the over 16,000 townlands of Ulster are not covered.
Townlands, in Irish ‘bailte fearainn’, are small areas of landholding unique to Ireland dating back 1,000 years. The name can mean a farm or settlement, not a town in the modern sense. Good basic information about townlands is available at the website, www.logainm.ie, but the Ulster Historical Foundation has sparked much enthusiasm in genealogical circles with its announcement that in 2024–25 it will release the encyclopaedic the Townland Atlas of Ulster, edited by Andrew Kane, which will include maps and details of landholders in various eras.
In the meantime, with my grandmother’s Belfast and Lawrencetown ancestors in mind, I keep dipping into the riches contained in Bardon’s book. On a visit to
Melbourne a couple of years ago, well-known linguist, Professor Dónal Ó Baoill of Queen’s University Belfast, kindly gave me a copy, but, aware that I had not mastered
its contents, I put off writing this review— and I have yet to start on Bardon’s three pages of further reading.
VAL NOONE
University of Melbourne
© Val Noone and Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand
Ulster Historical Foundation is grateful to the editors of the Australasian Journal of Irish Studies for permission to reproduce this review.