Moynalty & Ballivor

Moynalty

Moynalty, Co. Meath

Moynalty, Co. Meath

Courtesy of Meath County Library

Moynalty, Co. Meath
Courtesy of Meath County Library

Moynalty, Co. Meath

Moynalty, Co. Meath

Courtesy of Meath County Library

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Moynalty, the plain of the herds, is one of the oldest and most beautiful place names in Meath. P.W. Joyce gives its Irish name as Magh-nealta, the plain of the flocks, and says that this was also the ancient name for the level country lying between Dublin and Howth. The bardic annals state that it was the only plain in Ireland not covered with wood, on the arrival of the first colonists.

Samuel Ferguson expressed the charm of Moynalty he felt when he made the Fianna warriors declare that they would bury their beloved queen where she would hear "the lowing of Moynalty's kine.
Moynalty, Co. MeathThe old name of East Meath, Magh Breagh, was frequently translated as the beautiful plain, but more correctly the plain of a people called the Brega.

Maghera in North Meath is another form of the same word. Magheracloon, for instance, is the plain of the meadow, a lovely name if one remembers that cloon signifies more a rich, sweet pasturage than a mere meadow. Clonmore is the big meadow; Clongill, the meadow of the foreigner; Clondalee, the meadow of the two calves.

Ballivor

In ancient Ireland people were very conscious of the clan to which they belonged and they referred to themselves as the Síol Cuinn (Seed of Conn) or the Uí Neill (descendants of Niall). In the time of Brian boru, about the year 1000 AD, the practice of using surnames began.

With the arrival of the English colonists, use of the Irish prefixes O and Mac was prohibited, and the remainder of the Gaellic surname was written phonetically using English characters or translated into the closest English equivalent.

Iomhar was a common Gaelic surname in ancient Ireland. On the basis of its sound it became Eever and it came to be spelled Ivor. With the Mac prefix, the surname was MacEever, MacEver or MacIvor, and mistakenly, MacKeever. It is from a family named Iomhar, about whom nothing is known, that Ballivor gets its name.