What's in a name? The answer may be much more than we think. The deep-seated love of the land, which is probably peculiar to Ireland because of our history, has left us not only with wonderful place names but names for almost everything in the countryside.
Preserving these has become the mission of the Cork Place Names Survey, organised in conjunction with the FAS Seanchas Research Training Programme, under Dr Eamon Lankford.
This work is different from that of An Coimisiun Logainmneacha, the Place Names Commission, whose national research is conducted in conjunction with the Ordnance Survey. It will be years before this is completed, and place names which might have been lost will be preserved for posterity and published in book form, county by county.
Dr Lankford and his team aim to produce an archive of another kind, concentrating on Cork and Kerry and involving schools.
"We are collecting the names of fields and of all other manmade and natural features in the landscape," he said. "After all, these are the local names that are on the verge of extinction with urbanisation, changes in agriculture, fishing and so on.
"The Ordnance Survey and Place Names Commission have statutory obligations to map and provide correct forms of names, but they do not have the staff or finance to go to the farmer or fisherman in west Cork or Cape Clear or Kanturk to collect and map the minor place-name heritage of each county."
For years Dr Lankford had been collecting these previously unrecorded names as a labour of love before he decided to put the work on a formal footing. By the time a voluntary committee had been formed and the schools asked for their help, some 18,000 names were already in the archive.
In 1999 a three-way funding package was agreed between the Cork Place Names Committee, Cork County Council and the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands. FAS is providing up to 10 trainees who regularly work on the project.
The survey is now being extended to Kerry, and that section of it will be known as Aitainmneacha Chiarrai. Grant-aid for the project will run to £40,000 a year up to 2006, by which time the archive will be available through the library system.
Some 274 schools are involved in Cork, and 70 in Kerry. The committee provides the schools with maps, and students go to their parents or grandparents or the knowing ones locally, to identify the names of fields, stiles etc in their own place. Their participation has proved to be an invaluable aid to the project, Dr Lankford said.
The e-mail address is: logainmneacha@yahoo.com
Contact number
Readers who wish to contact Dick Hogan can leave messages by dialling 01-6707711, extension 6297