The Strand

How a place known as The Strand, in the townland of Mandistown, west of Ardee, came by its name was a mystery until an elderly local man recalled that it had been called Stang in his young days, which the dictionary renders as a measure of land or a ditch. It is an instance of the way in which an English word was substituted for one whose meaning the users no longer understood. In this case the lost word was not Irish but Old English. Stang is not related to the word stagnant, as applied to still water, as in a pool or ditch.

Old French estang, modern French etang, a marsh. This word probably arrived with the Normans. There is also a Danish word stang, which means a stick - a long stick used for measuring, and therefore a measure of length, like the perch pole or rod of the old tablebooks. Of these perch is the only one now used and it is only ever ap­plied to the kind of stick a caged bird stands on.

Sráid, a street, is cognate with the Latin strata, meaning a paved road. Older people may remember the word street applied to a paved yard in front of a house. The English language does not contain a single word beginning with sr-. When adapting an Irish word, a t is slipped in, so sráid became straid, and when the original meaning was lost, strand, being the nearest word in sound, was settled on. Another interesting example of this substi­tution occurs in The Mollies of Navan, mallaí being the Irish for brows or banks.