Bray is the name of a town, a civil parish and a townland in Co. Wicklow. There are two further townlands whose names are derived from Bray, namely Bray Commons and Little Bray. Little Bray and a portion of Bray Commons are situated on the northern side of the Dargle River. This area formed part of Co. Dublin until it was transferred to Co. Wicklow under the Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898. The portion of Bray situated north of the river and the southern part were distinguished in State documents in the following manner, little Brey (an example dated 1566) and Moche Bree (1538). Both Bray Head and Bray River, which was formerly the name of the Dargle River (= Bray water 1655c), are also derived from the same underlying placename. In fact the earliest reference recorded by Liam Price in The Place-Names of Co. Wicklow to the River Dargle dates from the eighteenth century. That particular name originally referred to a valley.

Brí Chualann / Cualann is sometimes claimed to be the Irish name of Bray. It would seem that this Irish name does not pre-date the beginning of the twentieth century. Brí Cualann appeared in print in the English-Irish version of a gazetteer by Seosamh Laoide entitled Post-Sheanchas ina bhfuil cúigí, dúithchí, conntaethe agus bailte puist na hÉireann which was published in 1905. In the Irish-English version of Post-Sheanchas which was first published in 1911, Laoide recommended two Irish forms of the name, Brí Chualann and Brí. Risteárd Ó Foghludha subsequently recommended Brí Cualann in another gazetteer entitled, Logainmneacha .i. [A] Dictionary of Irish Placenames (published in 1935). Brí Cualann was also used by Rev. Patrick S. Dinneen in his Irish-English Dictionary (1927 edition) as an example of the word brí, ‘a hill’. Cuala (genitive Cualann) is an ancient territorial name. As Laoide wished to replace the names of the counties which had been established by the English with old territorial names, he may have decided to add Cuala as specific element to the name.

Be that as it may, Bray doesn’t derive from Irish Brí. Brí is an old Irish word meaning ‘hill’ which is still preserved in various placenames, such as Bremore / Brí Mhór north of Balbriggan in Co. Dublin or Bruis / Brí Ois, near Tipperary town in Co. Tipperary, which means ‘hill of (the) deer’. The author of Irish Names of Places, P. W. Joyce, was amongst those who regarded Bray as a version of *Brí. In the first volume of his famous toponymic work, Joyce stated that 'Bri [bree] signifies a hill or rising-ground ... Bray, which is the name of several places in Ireland, is another form of the same word. Bray in Wicklow is called Bree in old church records and other documents'.

To be precise, both Bre and Bree are recorded in State and ecclesiastical documents dating to the thirteenth century. Bre is the earlier of the two recorded forms (see historical examples of the placename in The Place-Names of Co. Wicklow). These transliterated forms do not correspond to Irish Brí. It is worth remembering that the so-called great vowel shift – a noteworthy sound change which effected long vowels in English – did not occur until the fifteenth century probably. As a result of this sound change, the long vowel [ē] of Old and Middle English was raised in its articulation to [i] in words such as fēt / feet, sē / see.

The placename under discussion is referred to (seemingly) in an Irish poem on the kings of Leinster which was composed in the early tenth century. The placename, Breä, was disyllabic in that particular composition (see Historical Dictionary of Gaelic Placenames: Names in B). The name Dún mBrea is recorded, somewhat later, in the Dindshenchas, which is a body of literature in verse and prose form on the origin of famous places. This particular dún (‘fort’) was located in the territory of Cuala, according to the Dindshenchas, which further referred to ‘a noble sea’ (ard-ler) and ‘a river-mouth’ (inber). There is also an early reference in Irish literature to Dún Bré.

A letter by Professor Osborn Bergin which was published in the Irish Times on the 19th of April 1927, explained that the name Brí Chualann wasn’t of historical origin. In conclusion, the professor wrote: 'To sum up, Middle Irish scholars knew of a place called Dún Bré, at the mouth of a river in a district comprising the southern part of County Dublin and the northern part of County Wicklow ... The identification seems obvious [i.e. with Bray]. I do not know of any old authority for the name Brí Chualann'.

Liam Price, who was the author of many articles and of a series of books about Wicklow placenames suggested that Bré was in origin the name of the Dargle River. This would explain why Lough Bray / Loch Bré, from which a tributary of the Dargle River flows, is so-called. I leave the final word to Price, from an article of his entitled 'The name of Bray' which was published in the journal Éigse (volume IV): 'To sum up, Brea and Bré seem to be the early forms of the name Bray ... it does not seem likely that it represents the word brí, 'a hill'; and it is possible that it is an old river name'.