Date: 01/06/2024

As we enter June - the second month of summer as understood in the traditional Irish calendar - the GAA’s hurling championship has come into full swing, and with it the joys, wonders, sadness and frustration that it brings for so many of us who rarely get to Croke Park on All-Ireland Final day. Given the ancient nature of the game in Ireland it is unsurprising to find many examples of townland names referring to the sport, but the evidence for many of these placenames is ambiguous and other meanings were possibly sometimes originally intended.
In any case, probably the most obvious townland name to refer to hurling is Reanahumana/Ré na hIomána “the level ground of the hurling (the hurling ground)” (logainm.ie #7884) in County Clare. Although there are many English names referring to the game such as Hurlers Cross (logainm.ie #104144), also in County Clare, a crossroads which apparently derives its name from a public house called the Hurlers Inn, at that crossroad, similar placenames of Irish-language origin are by their very nature usually of greater antiquity. As recently as 2008 Art Ó Maolfabhail wrote a short teasing essay with the title 'Teorainneacha, Áthanna agus Iomáin' [“Boundaries, Fords and Hurling”] in the Tipperary Historical Journal (pp 164–174) in which he discusses various placenames in Counties Limerick, Tipperary and Kilkenny that may refer to the game of hurling. Some of the suggested associations with the sport in that article are tentative, but his example of Aughnagomaun/Áth na gComán (logainm.ie #47499) in County Tipperary, for example translated as “ford of the hurlets [sic]” by John O’Donovan in the Ordnance Survey Parish Namebook in 1840, is quite unproblematic. It is possibly fortuitous that O’Donovan - himself a Kilkenny man - chose the old-fashioned word ‘hurlet’ here, thereby avoiding the often heated modern debate as to whether the Irish camán should be called a ‘hurley’ or a ‘hurl’ in English. (One of the current writers who is from Wexford would most certainly call it a ‘hurl’!)
However, a more significant problem which needs to be considered when translating placenames containing camán is that, etymologically, the Irish word can refer to any bent or crooked object or feature, being a derivative of cam (FGB s.v. camán cam). Thus, although by the 1830s Aghacommon/Achadh Camán (#56421) in County Armagh was understood by local Irish speakers to mean ‘field of the hurls’, Dr Pat McKay notes in A Dictionary of Ulster Place-Names that the name probably actually referred ‘to windings in the Closet river, which forms its northern boundary’ (see placenamesni.org s.n. Aghacommon). Similary, John O’Donovan, having stated in the Ordnance Survey Parish Namebook that the name of the Hurley River in County Meath was a translation of 'Camán' [An Camán] (logainm.ie #1166957), pointed out that the original Irish name probably meant “crooked river”. The name possibly refers to the many bends and twists on that river east of the bridge at Rathfeigh.
It is clear that another location named An Camán/Hurley Point (logainm.ie #104145) at Deenish Island on the Shannon in County Clare, refers not to a “crooked river” nor to a real hurl(ey), but to the hurl-like appearace of Deenish itself. This similarity, which has since been obscured by changes in the landscape, is utterly obvious in the outline of the island on the Ordnance Survey 6ʺ map (first edition) - even though the shape is more reminiscent of the larger bossed hurls of the modern era. However, there is no doubt that it is the hurl itself which is referenced in the wonderful minor placename Lios Fear Beag na gCamán/Lisfarbegnagommaun (logainm.ie #1410538) near Corofin in the same county of Clare, albeit in an evocative supernatural context. The name means “the ring-fort of the little hurley-wielding men”, and one local explanation of its origin, recorded in 1939, can be found in the Schools’ Folklore Collection on dúchas.ie

(Conchubhar Ó Crualaoich & Aindí Mac Giolla Chomhghaill)

• Ré na hIomána/Reanahumana
• Áth na gCamán/Aughnagomaun
• Achadh Camán/Aghacommon
• Crois na hIomána/Hurlers Cross
• An Camán/Hurley Point
• An Camán/Hurley River
• Lios Fear Beag na gCamán/Lisfarbegnagommaun

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