The Northern Ireland Place-Name Project, established in 1987, researches the origin and meaning of the place-names of Northern Ireland. It is the only centre for the study of Gaelic place-names in the United Kingdom, with parallels in the Institute for Name-Studies in the University of Nottingham in England, and the Archif Melville Richards Place-Name Database in the University of Bangor, North Wales. The Northern Ireland Place-Name Project grew out of the work of the voluntary Ulster Place-Name Society established in 1952, and supports the aim of the Scottish Place-Name Society to achieve a similar centre for the study of place-names in Scotland. Within Ireland, the Northern Ireland Place-Name Project co-operates with colleagues in Dublin in the Placenames Branch of the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, and in the Locus project on historical Irish place-names in University College Cork.
The place-names of Northern Ireland include those of 6 counties, 60-plus barony and district names, 269 parishes, 9,600 townlands and at least 20,000 other names, in the languages of Irish Gaelic, English and Scots, with a few names in Latin or Old Norse. The gazetteer compiled by the Northern Ireland Place-Name Project is still growing, with current additions including both traditional names of fields and modern streets. There has always been a strong "community relations" aspect to the work, since everyone lives in a place.
Over the past 20 years the unit, which depends on funding from outside the university, has grown to include the following aspects of place-name research, although not all have been funded at any one time.
This website was developed to provide access to the information collected by this project.
You can search for names using a simple keyword search or you can browse through a selection of maps for places of interest.
This website uses p.mapper to allow you to explore and query a range of maps. P.mapper is a very powerful, easy to configure, map browser.
p.mapper is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Further information is available at the following link:
The p.mapper website.