I have befriended this farmer who has given me a lot of field names today. His family has been on the land for five generations, so some of the names are in Irish, but we both had no idea how to spell them. So I spelled them how I would spell them and then looked the townsland up in Owen O’Kelly’s Book “Place-names of County Kilkenny” and tried to match them up, but my Irish is really bad and not sufficient for such a job.

I also found a benchmark on his land which I had overlooked earlier.

I have another list of 80 odd field names I got today from a different townsland (Ruthstown) and it looks like I got all the fields in that townsland. I have my work cut out for me. I hope DeBigC and Sascha are gonna be pleased. I am.

So, I had made this umap of field names done in Ireland using overpass-turbo (learning so much, it’s amazing!), and I noticed someone had done tremendous work in Bannow Bay, which is where the Normans first landed and there are some very interesting field names there. There is a Chapel Field and one was Roche’s Field, a common Norman name in Wexford. It just goes to show how much history is captured in those field names. And also The Blue Bell, how cute is that?

And I have actually been there and like many other mappers, I do go into OSM when I visit a place and might add a few things. So I knew for certain that these were recent additions. I much appreciate Sascha’s contribution. I wish him success in continuing his work there. Maybe I’ll get a chance to add some in Cullenstown, not too far from there.

Exciting, first entry: So, I’ve been interested in fieldnames in Ireland for a while. Maybe because it’s so exotic to me, because I’m not from a farming background and I’m not aware they exist in Germany. Maybe because it’s oral history and highly underrated by scholars and taken for granted by farmers, i.e. they don’t see the value in their personal heritage (“Sure, that’s just the name we use, like.”).

I’m also a member of Kilkenny Archaeological Society and always on the lookout for group projects that might bring new members into the society or just a bit more engagement with actual people rather than books or bones.

Anyway, being a newbie on FieldPapers, I thought I’d give it at try. I had got a glimps into FieldPapers during the talk Ciarán gave. I liked the idea that a group of people could work together, maybe even in a school project. Gotta get them mappers young!

The Links

The first video is about how to make the atlas, the second about how to use the png files in the iD editor. I thought JOSM was a bit too techical and scary for beginners. It’s also not terribly more useful for field names than the iD Editor is. I had made a tutorial before that of just using the iD editor.

I had sent links to a couple of historical and archaeological societies I found on Facebook, the ones that did reply (lockdown + expected demographic = non responsive) were throughout postitive about it and shared it on their page. I just picked some random ones where county names came to mind. I should send out a few more to the Wesht, before it’s too late.