The Placenames and Landscape of the Parish of Claregalway (original) (raw)
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Place-name Studies and Agrarian Colonization in North Wales
Welsh History Review, 1980
ANALYSES of landscapes should not be regarded merely as static, formal, descriptive exercises in which it is sometimes appropriate to discern those relics of the past which are embedded in the present. Rather their interpretation should be that of an evolving organism or system, harmonized at any given stage with the prevailing political, social, economic and technological appraisals of the physical environment of the locality. It follows that by utilising the methods of historical and contemporary cartography, archaeology, toponymy, aerial photography and the results of direct field observation and documentary study we are reconstructing complex sets of phenomena. These phenomena are of scholarly interest in themselves, but also because of the light they shed on past human behaviour and perceptions. The task of reconstitution or recreation becomes all the more difficult when it is realized that as the objects of research farms and fields-are in a state of flux and transition, so too their formative influences may be equally subject to periodic upheaval. It is selfevident that the purpose of name-giving is identification or characterization, either by oneself or by others who may not necessarily belong to the same culture group. If the primary intention is to distinguish one location (site) or area from another to avoid confusion, as in all aspects of differentiation the criteria employed in the choice of a name presume selection of key elements of description pertaining to (i) inherent uniqueness, and (ii) points of contrast with adjacent places. These two components-the specific attributes and their relationships to other phenomena-are central to the significance and potential geographical value of place-name analysis.
Place-names in Landscape Archaeology
Place-names represent one of the most valuable resources available to the landscape archaeologist. Not only do they contribute to the task of reconstructing landscapes, they also offer vital insights into how people understood, ordered, and interacted with their surroundings (Jones and Semple 2012a; Carroll and Parsons 2013). For historic periods, place-names provide unique and unrivalled windows into the physical and cognitive worlds of past communities. They inform on all aspects of human experience from social organisation through economic activities to religion and belief. In short, place-names reveal how people once thought; and, for the contemporary landscape archaeologist, they prove to be good, to think with (Jones and Semple 2012b). Place-names can play this role because they were socially constructed and environmentally contingent. They were designed to carry and communicate information of relevance for those that encountered them. They were invariably created to be meaningful and useful, to be reflective of local conditions and human experience, and they were intended to be understandable.
Locus focus: forum of the Sussex Place-Names Net 1996-2007
2007
This is volume 1, number 1, of the newsletter of The Sussex Place-Names Net, a group of people having an active scholarly interest in the place-names of Sussex, major and minor. "Having an interest" means collecting names, making databases, constructing and publishing explanations of names, identifying the sites named by names no longer current, and putting specialist knowledge from other disciplines at the disposal of place-name scholars. The "owners" and copyright-holders of Locus focus are the Net; the editor is Richard Coates. The editor has provided most of the copy for this first-flowering, but does not intend to monopolize each issue. We are not a mindlessly exclusive body, and would be happy to welcome new members to the Net, with the sole condition that anybody wishing to join should be active in research, on however small a scale, anxious to make their findings widely known, and keen to join in semi-public discussion. Contributions to Locus focus, queries, notes, short articles (500 words maximum), notices of events, are welcomed from members of the Net and nonmembers alike. Notes and short articles will be subject to editorial control in a friendly and constructive spirit. Our aim-a rather general one-is to make further information available to a future Editor in Sussex of the English Place-Name Survey. The Survey covered Sussex nearly 70 years ago, but published very little in its two-volume work The place-names of Sussex (1929/30) about the minor names of the county. Such a distance also makes it possible for new views to arise about the origin and meaning of the names that were actually surveyed. We hope to contribute to all aspects of the enterprise, in both collection and correction. We expect to publish two newsletters a year, in Spring and Autumn. For the time being, this will happen thanks to the good offices of the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex. The normal size of the newsletter is expected to be smaller than this. The launch issue is unusually fat, because it includes a list of all publications relevant to Sussex place-names that have come to the editor's attention since he published his Classified bibliography on Sussex place-names, 1586-1987 (Younsmere Press, 1987). No attempt has been made to classify them; but then the classification scheme adopted in the original book was pretty inept. O for hindsight before the event! • CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE Personal introductions of Net members 3 Recent literature 5 News items 17 Forthcoming events 17 Note on methods: Standard formats for collecting name-spellings 18 Notes 18 Queries 20 Short articles 21 (Mark Gardiner, Basingeham; Richard Coates, On the administrative term rape) Book notice 23 Locus focus : newsletter of the Sussex Place-Names Net Volume 1, number 1 2 Autumn 1996 • NET MEMBERS
Oral tradition, landscape and the social life of place-names
Sense of Place in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. R. L. C. Jones and S. Semple, 2012
For much of the twentieth century most of the effort in place-name studies was devoted to taxonomy. Scholars sought to identify the elements which lay behind names so that they might be placed into categories. This was, of course, an essential first step in dealing with the many hundreds of thousands, probably millions of placenames in England and learning how they might be employed to answer other questions. However, the taxonomic approach does have clear limitations, and in particular it tends to prioritize the roots of a name and the time when it was first employed. It does not encourage scholars to pay attention to what might be termed the social life of place-names, the way in which they were employed by communities over the centuries and how their meanings may have changed. This paper seeks to investigate these two issues. It considers the use of place-names, both during the Anglo-Saxon period and subsequently, by examining the role of oral tradition.
Journal of the English Place-Name Society 49 (2017)
The Journal of the English Place-Name Society 49 (2017) was published in October 2018, edited by Paul Cavill and Rebecca Gregory. The contents page is available here, and the print journal is available from the English Place-Name Society (see epns.org).
The study of place-names is an inherently multi-disciplinary activity which draws on and speaks to many other domains of research. This paper examines a category of names which can be termed ‘copied names’ or 'off-the-peg names', and which are of particular relevance to historians, archaeologists and geographers, as they tend to refer to notable buildings and public spaces. What connects them is neither their (literal) meaning nor their linguistic origin, but rather the manner in which they are copied from a site with a particular function, status or association to other sites which share, or have pretensions to sharing the same function, status or association. The name Smithfield was applied to markets in Dublin and Belfast simply because these places had an equivalent function to the meat-market of the same name in London, without regard to the derivation from Old English smēðe feld, ‘smooth field’. Owing to the divorce of etymology from ‘functional meaning’, this class of names has been prone to certain types of misunderstanding, both by toponymists and scholars of other disciplines. Some guidelines for dealing with copied names will be suggested, based on Irish models of good practice. This research was prompted by the work of Gary Dempsey on burial grounds named Bully’s Acre for an undergraduate dissertation at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. Conference programme and abstracts: https://earlymodernirelandconference.blogspot.com/2010/07/abstracts.html Article, published in Archaeology Ireland, summer 2019, available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26844469?seq=1#metadata\_info\_tab\_contents
The Cailleach in Place-Names and Place-Lore
The Journal of Scottish Name Studies 14, 2020
The principal aim of this article is to refine our understanding of the Gaelic place-name element cailleach. This will be done primarily through analysis of a cluster of cailleach-names and associated place-lore from one area of the island of Muile/Mull in the Inner Hebrides. The main geographical area of focus is small but its namescape is dynamic and the analysis has implications for our understanding of this place-name element furth of the island and, indeed, furth of Scotland. The evidence lies in a range of published and unpublished textual and oral sources; in place-names, place-lore, linguistics and song. It will be argued that, when considered together, these sources provide evidence of a dynamic namescape which has been shaped by its associated place-lore and which has, in turn, fed the creative imaginations of local place-name users. It is argued that the namescape of north-west Muile/Mull is a microcosm of dynamism in language and lore. Furthermore, the argument has implications for our understanding of other place-name elements, including the Gaelic elements coileach, achlais and dròbh (also drògh).
Reading the place-names of a monastic landscape: Balmerino Abbey
Cîteaux commentarii cistercienses, 2008
Les toponymes des terres sur lesquelles l'abbaye de Balmerino a ete fondee refletent quelque chose des proprietaires fonciers seculiers et religieux qui ont precede la communaute cistercienne. Ils renvoient aux possessions du monastere picte et plus tard gaelique d'Abernethy et a celles du prieure augustin de St Andrews et des Cisterciens de Coupar Angus. L'association des noms de lieux avec les proprietes de l'abbaye de Balmerino montre que l'impact des nouveaux moines cisterciens sur la toponymie existante et principalement gaelique fut peu important, au moins pendant les premieres decennies de l'existence du monastere, jusqu'en 1250 lorsque la population abandonna le gaelique dans quelques autres regions du Fife et se mit a parler ecossais.