Eagles and wolves: The long-lost animals that live on in Irish place names

Irish place names hark back to a world alive with cranes, wolves and eagles. Now these old names are piquing the interest of nature-lovers and ecologists.

Along the island of Ireland's southwestern reaches lie craggy headlands blasted by Atlantic storms. This is the very edge of Europe, where County Kerry's breath-taking Dingle peninsula – a crooked finger of black rock and green grass – points resolutely west. And right at the end of that peninsula stands an ocean-facing mountain called Sliabh an Iolair: "Mount Eagle".

"That mountain," recalled the famed Irish folk-teller and author Peig Sayers during the early 20th Century, "was full of eagles in my young days, though there isn't one of them left now." An eagle's nest could once be seen on a lakeside cliff atop the mountain, she said. Sayers was born in 1873 and died in 1958. During her lifetime, both mountain-loving golden eagles (iolar fíréan) and white-tailed eagles (iolar mara) went extinct in Ireland. "It is a long time now," the illiterate Sayers told her son in recollections about Sliabh an Iolair that he wrote down, "since there was an eagle's nest there."

Ireland is swathed from top to bottom in wonderful Irish place names. Many are richly descriptive, referring to animals, plants, the shape of the land, agricultural practices, and also the weather and climate. There is now growing interest in Ireland, among some, in investigating the meanings of those place names.

Researchers are using this information to understand Ireland's ecological past and potentially also to protect its future – by providing precious clues about hidden environmental features. These range from forgotten flood plains to ancient wildlife habitats.

"Place names […] are local knowledge – they have emerged over centuries," says Mairéad Nic Craith, a folklorist at the Institute for Northern Studies, part of the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland.

Irish, one of Europe's oldest living languages, has been spoken in Ireland for more than 2,000 years – and partly as a result of that, its place names capture a long history of people living with the land.

However, many of these names were changed or rewritten during English colonisation and the English versions of some place names often lose all or much of the original meaning. Take Tuaim na Mac Tíre, meaning, "grave of the wolf". Wolves became extinct in Ireland during the 18th Century due to hunting and habitat loss, but the old place name reminds us of their historical presence.

The English version, "Toom", lacks any reference to wolves. Mac tíre, by the way, means "son of the land", a highly poetic way of referring to a wolf. Wolves come up in many other place names around Ireland, including in some English translations, such as Wolfhill – or, in Irish: Cnocán na Mac Tíre.

"There's a connection between the environment and the Irish language," says Nic Craith. "It reflects a people who took more notice, and who had maybe more time to notice the environment than we do nowadays."

Last year, Nic Craith and a colleague published a paper arguing that........

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