Eagles and wolves: The long-lost animals that live on in Irish place names
AlamyIrish place names hark back to a world alive with cranes, wolves and eagles. Now these old names are piquing the interest of nature-lovers and ecologists.
Along the island of Ireland's southwestern reaches lie craggy headlands blasted by Atlantic storms. This is the very edge of Europe, where County Kerry's breath-taking Dingle peninsula – a crooked finger of black rock and green grass – points resolutely west. And right at the end of that peninsula stands an ocean-facing mountain called Sliabh an Iolair: "Mount Eagle".
"That mountain," recalled the famed Irish folk-teller and author Peig Sayers during the early 20th Century, "was full of eagles in my young days, though there isn't one of them left now." An eagle's nest could once be seen on a lakeside cliff atop the mountain, she said. Sayers was born in 1873 and died in 1958. During her lifetime, both mountain-loving golden eagles (iolar fíréan) and white-tailed eagles (iolar mara) went extinct in Ireland. "It is a long time now," the illiterate Sayers told her son in recollections about Sliabh an Iolair that he wrote down, "since there was an eagle's nest there."
Ireland is swathed from top to bottom in wonderful Irish place names. Many are richly descriptive, referring to animals, plants, the shape of the land, agricultural practices, and also the weather and climate. There is now growing interest in Ireland, among some, in investigating the meanings of those place names.
Researchers are using this information to understand Ireland's ecological past and potentially also to protect its future – by providing precious clues about hidden environmental features. These range from forgotten flood plains to ancient wildlife habitats.
Alamy"Place names […] are local knowledge – they have emerged over centuries," says Mairéad Nic Craith, a folklorist at the Institute for Northern Studies, part of the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland.
Irish, one of Europe's oldest living languages, has been spoken in Ireland for more than 2,000 years – and partly as a result of that, its place names capture a long history of people living with the land.
However, many of these names were changed or rewritten during English colonisation and the English versions of some place names often lose all or much of the original meaning. Take Tuaim na Mac Tíre, meaning, "grave of the wolf". Wolves became extinct in Ireland during the 18th Century due to hunting and habitat loss, but the old place name reminds us of their historical presence.
The English version, "Toom", lacks any reference to wolves. Mac tíre, by the way, means "son of the land", a highly poetic way of referring to a wolf. Wolves come up in many other place names around Ireland, including in some English translations, such as Wolfhill – or, in Irish: Cnocán na Mac Tíre.
"There's a connection between the environment and the Irish language," says Nic Craith. "It reflects a people who took more notice, and who had maybe more time to notice the environment than we do nowadays."
Last year, Nic Craith and a colleague published a paper arguing that Irish place names are a form of traditional ecological knowledge, since they capture ecological diversity and change.
Nic Craith also gives the example of wild boar. The history of boars in Ireland is somewhat murky. Some sources say native boars went extinct in prehistoric times, though others suggest that boar populations, perhaps reintroduced animals, were present well into the medieval era. But anywhere you find turk (Irish for "boar") in a place name could indicate that location was once home to these animals. Cluain Torc, or Clonturk, means boar's meadow, for example.
There's also the crane (corr), which comes up in various locations including Oileán na gCorr, or crane island, in County Leitrim. These gangly birds went extinct in Ireland hundreds of years ago.
AlamyMemories of trees and water
Ecological memory in place names is far from exclusive to animals. Any place called Derry (or, in Irish: doire) that is now a town or city was quite likely once a wood – doire means wood and often an oak wood, specifically. For thousands of years, Ireland faced successive waves of deforestation, as trees were cleared for farmland and also to extract timber for construction.
Various groups, right back to Neolithic and Iron Age Irish peoples, as well as Vikings, Normans and English settlers, took sizeable bites out of Ireland's forests – a history that can be reconstructed by analysing traces of tree pollen preserved in the ground. Eventually, the island was left one of the most deforested places in Europe.
As if gesturing back to a leafier past, tree species come up countless times in Irish place names. Take dair, which means oak. It appears in Cill Dara, or Kildare, meaning "church of the oak". There is also Doire na Fuinse, or "ash tree wood". As in many places, ash in Ireland is susceptible to a disease called ash dieback, and most of the remaining trees are expected to disappear.
Some Irish place names may not only be a shadow of things lost. They could also point towards a future in which restoration of the environment, or rewilding, brings back certain species or habitats.
Just north of Dublin lies a place historically known as Loch Gabhar, which in Old Irish meant lake of (the white) horses. Historically, the Irish word gabhar has been used to mean white horse or goat; today, it means goat. Although there is no lake in this location now, analysis of the subsoil suggests there used to be a larger and a smaller lake there. Researchers recently proposed that these areas might be rewetted to capture floodwater, allowing it to drain into a nearby river. As the risk of flooding grows in Ireland due to climate change, that could in principle make this a place-name-informed climate adaptation.
Getty ImagesReturn of the wild?
Outside of Ireland, ancient place names are also drawing attention for their ecological potential. Researchers have looked to Old English place names in Britain in the hope of gaining a better understanding of locations at risk of flooding. That could in turn prompt solutions around flood resilience planning.
Rewilding projects in Scotland have taken note of Scots Gaelic place names mentioning trees, citing them as potential cues for where tree-planting efforts could occur.
But one shouldn't take place names too literally. "Just because a place name mentions a tree or an animal doesn't necessarily mean that that tree or animal was actually there – it might have been a metaphor, it might have been a symbol," says Nic Craith.
There is a place I sometimes go sea swimming, not far from Belfast, called Portmuck. It sounds a little off-putting in English, but muc in Irish means pig and some say this was most likely a port that people brought pigs to. Having said that, the nearby Isle of Muck (Oileán na Muc), now a bird sanctuary, looks to me a bit like a pig lying on its front with part of its body submerged. Is that the reason for the name? There's another Isle of Muck in Scotland, in that case apparently named after muc-mara, sea-pigs or whales. Sometimes "muck" has nothing to do with (land-roaming) pigs at all.
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Ray Ó Foghlú, head of partnerships and development at Hometree, a nature restoration charity in Ireland, says place names are not "instructions" to recreate the past: "Their real value is in showing us what a landscape has been capable of." Ecologists can then test locations for their rewilding potential. Equally, somewhere with no hint of trees or woods in its name could actually be a perfect site, today, for a tree-planting project, for example. Nic Craith describes place names as "a starting point".
And who knows where they will lead you. Although Peig Sayers never lived to see it, white-tailed eagles were reintroduced to County Kerry in 2007, at Killarney National Park, roughly 52 miles (83km) from Sliabh an Iolair. There are now roughly 150 white-tailed eagles in the wild in Ireland. They are breeding, and sustaining their own population. Golden eagle reintroductions are also underway elsewhere on the island.
Tantalisingly, some of the white-tailed eagles have even found their way back to the area around Sliabh an Iolair.
Perhaps eagles will one day build a new nest on that famous mountain. A place that, once again, is named after animals living in this part of the world – memories reborn.
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