Shared Space: The Role of Place-Names in Ulster

In this episode, we listen to Linda Ervine, Úna Walsh, Dr. Niall Comer and Dr. Frances Kane as they discuss the value and importance of celebrating our place-names tradition, as well as the future role of place-names in uniting communities here. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:52

So um I just like to tell people I'm a um a linguistic archaeologist, so in a way um we're taking contemporary forms of the name, um, and our database also has um historical records of the name, so you can kind of see the trajectory of the name over time. And um, as somebody who studied linguistics, that's what brought me to the project, um, looking at how the names change over time, but I think working backwards, um looking at the historical forms and ultimately trying to find out the linguistic origin of the name, you know, what was this name when it was coined in the languages it was coined? So um, we've just finished at Christmas time there, um, a three-year phase of looking at all the timeline names. So um I mentioned timelines previously, so um, we've just completed that phase, and I'm now looking at um minor names as the next stage of the research because there's uh there are thousands of names that we need to address in the database, and it's just chipping away, you know, with my theoretical dust and brush.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Well, I suppose I came from it very much from the oral tradition, um, which is extremely strong in the South Amma area that I come from, um, and uh and that sense of that you were beginning to lose that sense of where your boundaries were between your town lands and that uh that that needed to be retained, and also um that you needed to to instill back in that sense of pride. Uh I go into the primary schools, so I go into a P7 class that's leaving and go to different schools, and the first thing is write, everybody put away their books, put away your pencils, you're not gonna write anything down, you're gonna listen to stories, you're gonna tell me stories, and the only thing I ask from them is that when they are asked where they live, that they reply with their town landing. Because you won't bring anything back by trying to enforce it, but you bring it back with a love of it and with a respect for it. Uh I'm in the town land of Mafonor, the plain of the beans, the road that goes down past goes into the townland of Caracaldreen, the rock of the blackthorn. That child has now been told that they live on the bog road. Now there's a big difference in living on the bog road and living in Caracal Dream. Like Q had said there's music in the song, but there's the sounds of it. Um, you know, Linda talked about Liz, you know, the four, taking you right back to the Celtic people and where they lived. Lis Amory, Liscalgat, Lis Droniska, Lis Drumgullian, Lescalgat, you know, Corless, Valnalis. These are the names that the children have gone back to that time. My mother, my mother's Thailand, Dorsey, the gateways to Navan Fort, to the stories of Conor McNessa. I mean, how could you not love it? Well, I think for the local, um, the place name, the town lands uh for local history are absolutely central to all that happens to our own heritage of local history. I mean, you only have to look at you know Hewitt's Ulster names, the the way he spoke of it, you know, when you speak of the name and I see the place and at the role of the tongue. And the the introduction of the rural road naming in 1972 started to fracture that knowledge of the town lands. We had passed almost three generations of people, and the person who does local history best and the person who does family history is the granny or the granddaugh. And if the knowledge is not in that third, in that first generation of those people, it's gone. It's gone. So the the town lands are absolutely central to everything that happens in local in the local area, and they're central to your historical research because all you need to bring you back through the generations, uh, through the census, through Griffith's valuation, all you need is your town land name.

SPEAKER_02 4:34

I can identify with everything that has been said from Una's point of view and what Francis has said to you about you can approach you can approach the place and research from an academic point of view, which I have done. Um but also with that emotional connection that that Una follow that, you know, but that Una has that that Una has described so well, I can I can appreciate that massively because you know once you start to investigate place names and like this sort of process is being almost like a linguistic archaeologist, it becomes you start to identify massively with the place you've been studying. The area I live in, as a rural area in the North Area in the Long. It's a part of Oregon. And I I've studied the place names from a linguistic point of view, but I can safely say now that I've spent so much time digging at them metaphorically, learn the stories behind it, learn the people that live there. Because you read all this on your way when you're looking at census reports, when you're looking at a different spell of the name, when you're looking at a map, you almost start to feel part of it, and you know, you start to read the landscape in a very different way. Um, you know, you mentioned the list, the drum, all these different things, and you start to you find yourself getting ready for a walk and looking at something going, I wonder what that was called. You know, and and particularly around the coastal area, I have a fascination about um if you're happening around the Causeway coast and that you do have this uh influence of Scots Gaelic, and then the Norse influence and the other influences that Francis had mentioned, and it becomes like an obsession. So there's there's there's the there's the element of yes connected to the place, but there's almost there's almost this you know constant curiosity about can I find something new? Is there a word, is there a way to describe something that I've never heard before? So it's it's um again it's a mixture of dive, snipe, and also an economic curiosity, so it's it's both.

SPEAKER_03 6:39

You know, for me it really was a discovery. I started learning Irish and suddenly I was introduced to place names, and when I think about it now, you know, and I was born in Belfast, I'd lived my whole life in Belfast, I didn't know it was Belfast. So not to have such a you know, such a basic piece of information. I was shocked, and then I was shocked when I realised that all these places around me had come from the Irish, and I wanted to share that with other people, but I also felt very, very frustrated and I suppose almost angry and sad that this knowledge had been denied to me because of the tradition I come from, it wasn't something that was shared within my own community. So I suppose I, in many ways, I wanted to write that and I wanted to say the other people. Also, it was really interesting because when I started learning Irish, I suddenly realised, of course, that the language was all around me, and two schools stick out for me in East Belfast, two primary schools, two state schools, and that's Lisnachara Primary and Notmagunny Primary. Notm'Gunny is on a hill, and its badge is a hill with rabbits on it, and Lisbishara, and their badge has four horses and it says the Four to the Fools, and of course Lisnachara, the Four of the Fools, Prof McGinney, the Hill of the Rabbits. You know, these were places I have passed every day of my life. I had no knowledge that that was from the Irish, and you know, whoever had created the badges of those two schools obviously knew about the town land name and had a knowledge of the Irish, and there it was sitting there in full view. So, you know, it's it it seemed so wrong that it's there but it's it's almost hidden.

SPEAKER_04 8:25

Just to um pick up on something that Linda said previously about not being aware that these names actually have a meaning, you know. You hear um uh I suppose a typical way of describing an Irish town as a bali, you know, they're balletically, you can make them up, you know, but they um they really do mean something, and you don't need a lot of, you know, you don't need to be a fluent Irish speaker to be able to interpret the names because they they tend to follow most of the time um typical patterns. So, you know, when you see a ballet, it's pretty much well, that's about a bad example. Lots of ballys are wallets, um, and you know, if you see um I keep thinking of ones that have two different meanings, like glass it's a colour rain, but glass is also the word for a river. You're just I suppose you could um you could frame it today as like a a a place name hack. You know, if you if you look at a lot of placenames and where they come from, um you can kind of predict where what the origin was originally, um, with like I said, with with very little um information. The majority of our place names are of Irish language origin because uh Irish was spoken here historically. Um but we have influences of other languages not spoken here. I mentioned the the Viking influence, so we have some names that are um from Old Norse, which would have been the language that the Vikings spoke in the 8th century. Um from in and around the 12th century, that's when we start to see the influence of other names. So the Anglo-Normans first came in the 12th century, speaking English and French. So we have um an element McGrange, which comes from um French, but then within um Gale size and then re-ang size, it comes out as Grantia. So you don't really think French when you see a name McGrantia. Um 12th century we have English and French, um, and then in the 17th century again we have um a lot more English names and Scots names from um the arrival of Scottish settlers and English settlers in the 17th century when they came on their drove and brought their names with them. You know, that's we have lots of names that are town or tunnel and that are like names you would see in England, but they they're from English. Well, Mr.

SPEAKER_02 10:30

I think too there's nothing that's weird there at all. Um I think that the the what you've mentioned there, it's a good way of of sort of tracing a history of Ireland, you know, the different influences that that are there, but something that I often find uh fascinating is that it shows you how strong the the names that that that were established were because yes, I know we do have influences, but the fact that there wasn't a mass anglicisation of names at any point sorry, there was a mass anglicisation, but not a mass translation of names. There were attempts made in some cases to rename places. You know, you had, for example, Drapers Town, which was Balina Kretchet, Balinus Green, that stuck, that stuck, you know, because the uh that was given to the Drapers Company, but you have other ones like Vintnerstown, which was black, I think, you know, that didn't stick. So it shows you that you know that the names that were there were so ingrained in people's secche and in their very part of their day, and it was where they were from was part of them. So any attempt to completely translate the names just didn't work and and never would work, you know. But I think I mean what the Francis has said about the the linguistic history of Ireland can be traced to the place names.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

But I think then central to all of that is is is the sense of local, you know, the sense of you know the town land is the piece of land that all of the people that were in that area stood on together. And sometimes that worked well, and sometimes it didn't work so well, but it was inherent in both of them. Um and putting up uh the boundary stones or doing work like that when you're working at it from a community level up and you don't allow it to become politicized, where it's just important to the people in that area, and there is nobody knows there is with greatest respect in academia, there's nobody knows the stories like the lookout. I agree. There is nobody you know that can that can just tell you, no, you know, you're about a hundred yards out there, don't dare put that stone in there because you're you know, but but that's that's the glory of it, and that's that's again for what you're putting into your children, it's their sense of pride of where they're from, because they will go all over the world, which they should do, but what you bring with you and what you carry is a light load of the core sense of who you are, and that's the town land, and that is the town land in the GEA banner, it's the town land in the orange order banner. The town land is the central bit that everyone connects to.

SPEAKER_02 13:10

Two that have stuck in my head um throughout my life, and there's one that lives quite near where living now is called Slacht Averty, and it's translates as Slacht Averty, which is like the graveslab and gravestone grave cap of Auerdach, which was it was a historical character, but the story has gone about that he was actually a dwarf and an evil trickster that had been was terrorising the local community in Glenon and they kept the the the O'Cahne, which was the leader at the time, they kept basically killing him and he kept coming back and game terrorising the people, drinking blood, and I'm gonna come to that keep that in mind at a minute, uh, until finally he was buried, I think it was upside down with um a U stick through his heart. And there's a theory, believe it or not, um that that's this was recorded by Joyce in one of his early records that Bram Stoker has come across this story and took in animals to for the Dracula tale. Um now there are other theories about that that probably not go into now, but that was all the stuff, and that that that name is still used in the area, there's still the stone is still there, um, and there's a fairy tree beside it. There is historical, you know, there's no reason to believe that this is not an actual burial place of a character, but the myth that was built up around it um has been um is wonderful. And the other one is when I was in university, um I always remember the place at the time and didn't really think too much what it meant, but Dunsovenish, uh up around Port Stewart, which translates as Dun Suvnish, uh the fort of solitude or peace or whatever. And to me, it sort of it really explained, it was just it just to me stood for what that part of your life was that you were you were in this wonderful place in university. I didn't think about it at the time, but I do now.

SPEAKER_04 15:06

The one that I mentioned earlier, the um the historical name for Lauren Locke was Ulfricksfjord, um, and that's that's what the Vikings called it. And I I'd love to you know have a time machine and go back and find out who Ulfrich was. You know, was he a Viking king? Um and I I wrote a piece uh about a year ago about um the place names of Game of Thrones. Obviously, the the Game of Thrones was recorded here, and I sometimes think that fact could probably be better than fiction. You know, you could have a HBO epic series on you know Ulfric's Fjord and Benevena and all those places that have these fascinating stories associated with them. Um so any of those kind of names that commemorate important people of the past are um are really special to me.

SPEAKER_03 15:50

Well, the one that I really resonates with me is actually from North Belfast, even though I'm from East Belfast, and that's because my mother is from North Belfast, she's from the top of the Prumlin Road, and she comes from a place called Laganille. In fact, that's all we ever heard of called Laganille. Now my mummy's in her early 80s, and it's only in the last recent years I hear people calling it Ligonille and things, and I had to say to her, Mummy, what do you call the place where you're from? And she's kind of like, What are you talking about? Lagonille, that's where I'm from, Laganille. But of course, when I discovered then what it meant, when I was told what it meant, and it's lag, which is hollow in you of the limestone, and of course it's not far from the limestone road, it's almost like somebody just joining the dots, you know. And when I told that to my mommy, she was just amazed, you know. This was the place of her birth, her family are all from there, and to know that this had this beautiful meaning, you know, so they can keep like a meal, no such no such place.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

Yeah, well, like Linda said, joining the dots, the social history is the bit that makes it wonderful, puts the soul into it. Uh, when I come from Newton Hamilton heading to Fork Hill, um I come to the top of Karaman, Katraman, the quarter of Man and Man and the god of the sea. Um and the old people in South Armaged would have said it was the highest arable land in the area. So on the top of Karamanen and how it relates to what how they were named, on the top of Karamanen on a clear day, I can see the Irish Sea. You know, and that that's the importance of these names are not picked out of a hat. You know, they're put on the place because they're the context of where they're put on it. Um and the and you're at the top of Karamonen, and you're on the back of the wee speckled hills of the Ring of Gullyon, and you're home.

SPEAKER_02 17:43

I'd been doing a bit of work where I live now, and I'd find on a low-learned survey map, um, it was just a handwritten thing called Gary Lennus. This was back in the mid-1800s, mid-1800s, and sort of had an idea that it was uh working out Gary was you know like a grove or a garden, and Linnus was to do with the word children or the annie, and it turned out that it was a killean site, which was where children were buried that that hadn't been baptized, and they're always beside rivers. But the point, but nobody knew where it was until I started to do a bit of investigation with the local with a few people, and suddenly the next minute I was brought to this site which matched exactly what was described in the ordinance survey 160 years previously, actually now nearly 200 years, 200 years ago, and then if the farmer who now owned the land has now erected a cross on the site, you know, and this just came from a very, very small snippet, and then suddenly everybody in the area started to become fascinated by it, and it just shows you how one just one small bit of information can open up an entire history, and then all the other conversations come from this as well.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

So and that's the one that we're almost too late for because what what you're talking about are the field name places. Now, I would have known that story because it would have that one still stuck in in that area. Uh but the field names um are the one below the town lines, um, and they had they were practically gone even in my growing up. Um but um I'm probably the only one here maybe old enough to remember Donica Durlan. Don't used to do highways and byways on a on a on a Saturday night. He was he he went around, he walked the roads of Ireland, but he was the most wonderful broadcaster, and he was in Boston one night, he put out a program from Boston, and he was speaking to an old man of 87 who uh had been in the police service in Boston and he'd left me at 17. But anyway, he went through his life in Boston and then he said to him at the end of at the closing of the programme, he said, and you never went home. And the old man said back to him, Oh, he says I did son every night, and he named the fields on each side of the loaning that in on a loaning that he hadn't seen for 70 years, and he named each one of them the whole way up to the house. And it was the most powerful piece of recording I'd ever listened to because the the sorrow in his voice, but the pride in his voice that he could still do that, and I think you know, because we're looking at things every day, we've we we become less mindful of them. We don't protect them in the way that we should because we we just see them all the time and we think they'll always be there.

SPEAKER_03 20:31

But I have to say that somebody from Belfast, up until a few years ago, I had no idea at all that Fields had names. And I was I was somewhere down the country, and a man was giving a talk, and he was telling that somebody else had recorded it, and he had it from you know so many years afterwards, and I think it was published, but absolutely beautiful. And I I just sat there fascinated, and at the end I said, you know, I had no idea that Fields had names, and this older man in the audience, big country man, he said, What did he tell you, dear? If you go to a man's door and his woman comes out, how would she tell you where the man was? I thought, well, I never thought that that actually made sense.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

That's alright, because a friend of mine came up one night from Belfast and she said, But you're alright, use your lucky, use of use of town lands in the country. And I said, What do you think Belfast is better?

SPEAKER_03 21:27

Well, I'm glad to say I know that.

SPEAKER_02 21:30

I've always looked upon place names, I mean there's a linguistic element, obviously, in what what they mean, what what the actual name means, but that acts almost as a key to have a historical past, to a social past. I mean, if you take if you take a place name that has a geographical element, well it's straight away it's telling you what the land was like, but so much more can come from that. You know, if we if we look at say, I'm just thinking of the place name that was brought up on your ballot. Craig, which is Boba Nagrag of the Rocks, and interestingly enough, that became the main quarrying area within Uri, and it was this quarrying area that brought certain families that were you know that were stonemasons to the area, and those surnames, Makatear, are still very prevalent in the area. So not only does it just tell you what something means, but it opens up an entire social history that will be otherwise lost because this a lot of this history is not recorded as through the written history as we understand it. So I think that you know the point that Una made was you know it can the placenames were there right the way back in all the sources, and it just opens up endless possibilities in terms of our knowledge of the past and the communities that we came from and that we're still involved with.

SPEAKER_03 22:46

I think place names have a massive part of it, and I mean I think a lot of people who you know became engaged with the language because they found out about their local place name. And I know even with myself, when I started learning Irish, you know, I had the mistaken belief that though I was interested in it, I wanted to learn it, but in some ways that didn't belong to me, that it kind of belonged to another community or another part of Ireland. And when you find out about the place names, it gives you that sense of belonging and it's that information that you have, and I don't know, it kind of locates you. It's also wonderful to recognise the beauty that's around you, and it really struck me that I had never thought about all these elements, why you have these similar similar words in different place name elements that they actually had a meaning, and then to discover you know they're high or they're low or they're green, or you know, it's such a it's such a void of discovery. So, yeah, I think for a lot of people it's such an important way of linking into the language and linking into their their own sense of place.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

I think you just bring it back into your everyday speech, Catherine. It becomes your oral tradition again, so that instead of instead of that that's just what you identify with. And once it becomes used, especially among the younger people, it spreads itself. You know, the problem was that people weren't using them. Um so if they become used, if your oral tradition is strong and they're part of your oral tradition, you know, that's your way of bringing it all back, I think.

SPEAKER_02 24:21

Get them into grid alert and get them onto every sat nav available, because that's how people connect now with directions. I don't know how you would do it, but the technology I'm sure is obviously there to do it, but you know, if if we're if we're going to see how I obviously agree with you, you're in it and say it about introducing to you know the younger generation, but if we want to really get the use, it means it has to be through the modern forms. If I would say to say one of my kids now, you know, okay, when you're ordering Amazon or is it ASOS that tokens it's when you're ordering through this here, um, and they're just told all you have to do is put in your postcode, and that's all they have to do, that's all they're gonna do. You know, so there needs to be some some form of breaking them into sort of the modern technological society, but I'm not disagreement with what you say that we have these other matters too.

SPEAKER_03 25:15

Well, I think with me it's been you know, over the last ten years my work just raised an awareness, and my colleague um Dr. Gordon McCoy, we started off, he made a map of the town lands of East Belfast, which people are fascinated by, and then went on to work with Belfast City Council to make a Gaelic map of all the town lands of Belfast. So that gives people access to the town land in a way that the postcode will never let them.

SPEAKER_04 25:40

Well, I think the thing for me about place names that really draws me to them is the fact that they're so inherently connected to the people. So we do have lots of place names that have um personal names or surnames commemorating them, but even the names that aren't the place names that aren't named after people, they're uh they're I suppose a footprint of the people of the past. Um so the fact that we have different languages in our place names tells us the languages that were spoken here historically historically over time, you know. Thinking about people that um languages that aren't spoken here anymore, you have Viking names like the Strangford and Carlingford, and um, you know, you don't really think about the Vikings being in Lorne Locke, but Lorne Locke was previously known as Ulfrichsfjord, and I think there's a real there's a real connection to the people who inhabited this land before us that is kind of left in the place names for us to enjoy. We are working out the linguistic origins of the name regardless of what language it's in. Um so I think absolutely if you have a name that um is of Irish language origin, you know, put the Irish language form, put the English translation on as well for the people who don't speak Irish. I would put all the all the forms on because I think what Linda said earlier about um not knowing, not knowing what a name comes from or not knowing what it means, um you're really missing out on something really important. And you know, place names are everybody's, everybody has a timeline name. You know, most people don't say it until their Reads bill hits the front door because they they um adopted a policy to put the timeline names on your on the bill. But everybody has a timeline, everybody has a place, and everybody has a an inherent link to their place. Um and whether your name is Irish, you know, old Norse, some of the place names are a bit of both. Um you know, languages are innovative, and some names have um influenced from different languages. My favourite example, um you've probably heard me, if you've heard me talk before, you've probably heard it, is Burntolet River. Um so Burntollet River um contains three distinct languages. So it has burn, which is the Scots word for a river, it has Tollage, which is an old Irish word for a flood or an abundance, so the river, and then it has English river, so it's really river, river, river in three languages. But I suppose it it shows the you know deep down we're all the same, you know, the people who called it burn in the 17th century, and the people who called it tollage in the I don't know, maybe the 8th century, it's still still a river to them, so it's it's it's shared, and everybody everybody sees the world through their own eyes, and because if they're speaking a different tongue, it doesn't make a difference. We all experience the word in the same way, and place names reflect that, and I think we should harness that I think for the good.

SPEAKER_03 28:13

Well, I'd like to mention that again coming from a total or total amateur and a place of no knowledge. Um, when I discovered, you know, not only had the language gone to Scotland and the Isle of Man, so you see the same elements and place names and you know the same place names, but also that it's part of the family of Celtic languages, and so you see, you know, even in places in England that have place names that we can associate here, like Avon, which is our own, and Dover, which is our door, water, you know, that really blew me away because all of a sudden, you know, it was really widening about, and it's just the fascination. And I think everybody's touched on that here, especially you now. You know, you do really, you know, you you you just become so intrigued by it, and you just want to find out more and more. And I think that's um I suppose it should be a health warning, maybe, with the place names, you know, they are totally addictive.