Why collect place-names ?
Why bother ? In the past, people gave names to places for practical reasons: the inhabitants’ description of the land, where they met each other and so on. In a subtle way place-names tell the story of the life of the land and the life of the people. Today these names come to us like a voice from the past, a surviving historical record, sometimes where no documents exist. If we lose a place-name we lose an invaluable piece of information as well as a direct human link with the past. In the Urris project, our chief aim is to capture the pronunciation of a name, locate the place and pin it down on our maps. Less important is the way it is spelt or its meaning – that can be determined at a later stage. As Brother Conolly says, sometimes you may never find a meaning. The name may be pre-Celtic, a link perhaps with a long-disappeared people. What names are we looking for ? We are trying to discover any place-names, Irish and sometimes English, sometimes even pre-Irish, used in the past whic
