An Irish Placename Travels Abroad to the City of Baltimore.

If you were to pull out a map of your area this moment and have a look, how many places would you spot named after Irish villages, towns and counties? As you may have noticed, anywhere that the Irish – and other nationalities settled in numbers – they also brought along the names of their Irish home places.

Do you have any Irish placenames “transplanted” to the area around your home?

An Irish Placename Travels Abroad.

Just this week, a new property survey came out here in Ireland. Thankfully, house prices are rising out of the hole they fell into during this last recession. However, some areas have a little catching up to do. One such place is County Longford – or to give it the longer name: “Longfort of the O’Farrells”. Longford is a small county in the middle of Ireland with a population of 40,000 across the entire county.

Other surnames that are prominent in the county include:

Abbott, Allen, Armstrong, Banks, Bannon, Beirne, Belton, Boylan, Brady, Brennan, Briody, Burke, Burns, Cahill, Campbell, Carolan, Carrigy, Casey, Cassidy, Clarke, Clyne, Coffey, Collum, Conlon, Connell, Connolly, Connor, Corcoran, Corrigan, Cosgrove, Cunningham, Curran, Dalton, Daly, Delany, Dennigan, Devine, Devlin, Doherty, Donlon, Dolan, Donnelly, Donohoe, Dooris, Dowd, Doyle, Duffy, Duignan, Early, Egan, Fallon, Farrelly, Flanagan, Flood, Flynn, Fox, Geraghty, Gill, Gorman, Greene, Hagan, Hanley, Healy, Higgins, Hughes, Jones, Keegan, Keenan, Kelly, Kenny, Kiernan, Leavy, Lee, Lennon, Lynch, Maguire, Mahon, Martin, Masterson, McCabe, McCann, McCormack, McDermott, McGrath, McLoughlin, Molloy, Monaghan, Moran, Mulligan, Mulvihill, Murphy, Murray, Murtagh, Prunty, Quinn, Reilly, Reynolds, Rogers, Sheridan, Skelly, Smith, Thompson, Walsh, Ward, Whitney.

The county was created, or “shired”, in 1586 – and a number of individual families were granted lands and titles in the area. One of these individuals was George Calvert – in 1624 he was made “Lord Baltimore” of Baltimore Manor, County Longford. The title was held in succession by his family, until it was extinguished in 1771.

Blog017 - An Irish Placename Travels Abroad to the City of Baltimore.

Abbeyshrule, County Longford

The anglicised placename of “Baltimore” comes from the Irish “Baile an Tigh Mhoir” (if you say it fast is sounds like the way people in Maryland pronounce Baltimore). This translates as the “town/place/homeland of the big houses”. These days, we find “Baile” within many anglicised Irish placenames – the majority of which start with “Bally…”.

But, our story does not finish there. As you may be guessing – or know full well – the son of the first Baron Baltimore, known as Cecil Calvert – administered much of the family lands in the British colony of Maryland. When the town of Baltimore was laid out in 1729, it was named after Cecil Calvert, this second Baron Baltimore. And so, an Irish placename came to be anglicised and transplanted to a place many thousands of miles from the piece of land that held the name.

The curious thing is that there is no real sign of Baltimore in County Longford today – no one is quite sure where it is located as the name fell out of use in the vicinity many centuries ago. However, the name lives on in it’s “twin city” across the Atlantic – the City of Baltimore in Maryland. However, there is another Baltimore – a port fishing village just a few miles from here in Skibbereen – where the name lives on. But that is a story for another day!

Would you like to learn a little more about Irish placenames? To finish up, I have pulled together two earlier letters and a podcast show that should paint a fuller picture for you – and give you more of an insight into the places that your Irish ancestors held dear in memory, word and song.