Donegal Placenames

Back from another few days of Donegal fieldwork, this time mostly enquiring after local placenames. I regard it as the duty of my work as a mapmaker to not only attempt to accurately capture the ground detail but also to research the placenames, the labels that we apply to places on the landscape. Ideally these names would all have been gathered already and as a cartographer, I could simply choose which to include for any given map. But that’s not how it is, for some inexplicable reason the state over the many decades since independence has largely ignored this important part of our heritage and culture. For the state, it’s as if the placename record was settled in the 1840s and that all it needs to do is to establish official Irish forms of this small subset of the entirety. It’ll dictate that a particular stream named on the Ordnance Survey mapping should be given a certain name, whilst ignoring the fact that many adjacent streams have names known and used by locals for generations.

Truth to be told, it is often interesting and rewarding to visit local people who know their local placenames. To sit in their kitchens, listening to descriptions and pronunciation, describing names and features, also to be outside with places being pointed out. Whilst enjoyable it is also time consuming and costly work and thus I have to cut my cloth to suit my measure, concentrating on areas that have more relevance to users of our maps.

Pictured here is Pat O’Donnell of Dunlewey feeding his ewes & lambs, a man who has gathered sheep off the northern slopes of Slieve Snaght and the Poisoned Glen for many years. Pat would be typical of the hillfarmers and fishermen who have some of these names still. I got well in excess of 200 placenames last week, a simple example would be this large boulder capped with heather found in the Bluestacks and called Carraig a’ Hata – the rock with a hat.

#eastwestmapping