Ceatharlach/Carlow | logainm.ie
place of cattle, herds*
The Ploughing Championships 2019 are being held in Ballintrane (#3235) in the parish of Fenagh (#326) in County Carlow. Of course, the county received its name from the town Carlow; Thomas O’Connor, a member of the topographical staff employed by the Ordnance Survey in the early nineteenth century, wrote as follows on the origin of that anglicized placename in 1837:
The ancient name of Carlow was, it is locally said, Catharlach (cathair-lach) which is explained as signifying the city or fort on the lake or river […], as the town is built at the junction of the Rivers Burrin and Barrow, where tradition says the waters of both rivers covered so extensive a tract of ground, as to merit the name of a lake.
O’Connor rightly considered this explanation of the name to be rather fanciful, although he was unable to suggest a different origin. John O’Donovan, the famous placenames scholar who was also employed by the Ordnance Survey, added another explanation for the name to the same letter, which he heard from Irish speakers in his native County Kilkenny: ‘Ceithiorlach’, he wrote, meant ‘the quatriple [quadruple] lough’. Therefore, according to O’Donovan, the name is derived from the antecedents of the Modern Irish ceathair, ‘four’ and loch (lach), ‘a lake’.
O’Donovan’s explanation of the name was subsequently accepted without question by P.W. Joyce in his popular and very influential three-volume work on the placenames of Ireland entitled (The origin and history of) Irish Names of Places. In the third volume of his work Joyce explains the name as meaning ‘four lakes’, although he noted ‘there is no lake there now’. In fact much of Joyce’s material on placenames was derived from the earlier research work compiled by O’Donovan and his assistants in Ordnance Survey documentation.
Carlow or Ceatharlach in fact signifies, in all probability, the ‘place of cattle (or) herds’. The underlying word, spelled cethir in Old Irish, means a four-footed animal (cf. also the collective noun OIr. cethrae “herds”), and is of the same origin as the numeral ceathair “four”. The suffix -lach conveys the meaning ‘place of’ rather than ‘lake’. There are a number of references to the placename in Irish-language sources over a long period of time. For instance it is referred to as ‘Cetharlocht’ in the Middle-Irish saga Bórama (Laigen) [‘the cattle-tribute of Leinster’], which is preserved in the Book of Leinster manuscript (*c.*1100). The church of ‘Ceatharlach’ is said to have been granted to St. Comhghall of Bangor, County Down in the late 12th century Latin Life of that saint. The church was also dedicated to Comhghall according to various other Medieval Latin sources. Following the Anglo-Norman invasion, Carlow became an important English stronghold. There is a reference in various Irish Annals to the burning of ‘Cethurlach’ by the King of Leinster, Art Mac Murchadha in 1405 as part of ‘a great war with the foreigners’.
As regards the phonetic development of the name, the phoneme -th- /θ/ still had its fricative sound in Middle Irish, just as it has in Welsh or Standard English today. This fricative is reflected in early transliterated forms of the name, e.g. ‘Catherloc’ (1200c.), ‘Catherlagh’ (1297). Indeed this form became established in English to the extent that the archaic spelling Catherlogh was still to be seen in English documents down to the 19th century, even though at that stage the placename was not so pronounced in Irish or in English (cf. ‘Catherlogh, a bar[ony] in co. Carlow […] also the antient name of that co.’ in Seward’s Topographia Hibernica (1795)).
The phoneme -th- /θ/ became obsolete in Irish in the 13th century and developed to /-h-/. In the placename under discussion, this intervocalic /-h-/ itself disappeared and one long vowel was made of the surrounding short vowels. While this may have been due to the anglicization process, note that this development is also seen in other Irish placenames in this part of Leinster. The spelling ‘Carelagh’ (1528) may therefore be quite close to the Irish pronunciation of the period, as if *Cea’arlach. This long vowel can still be heard in the first syllable of the English name. ‘Kerlac’ (1480) in a Latin document is the earliest spelling in which the loss of -th- is indicated in writing.
The anglicized form of the name eventually rejected the final -ach /əx/, as is typical in anglicized placenames of Irish origin, and in this case it was replaced with /ə/, i.e., the central vowel or schwa (the final sound in the Irish word mála, for example). This vowel is the sound originally intended by the spelling -ow, which is found as early as the 17th century. Therefore, the English pronunciation in historical references such as ‘the castle and bawn of Carlow’ (1614) was something like *Caarl-uh */kaːrlə/— there would have been no rhyme with ‘Fallen is your star low’ in those days!