Why You Can't Find That Irish Town

Let's do a small experiment. Get out your Irish road map or atlas. Now find Dundalk in county Louth just north of Dublin. Draw a line in pencil between Dundalk, Inniskeen,Cullaville, Creegan, and Jonesburough. It should look a bit like a pentagon. Now, see if in the middle of your pentagon you can find Foxfield, Rochedale, Kane, Castletown, Phillipstown, Fangdart, Stranon or Dunbin. No? Well, you probably aren't going to find them on a modern map. Now if you go to Irish Ancestors and type in any of those names at the Placename Search you may have some better luck but then again you might not! As far as I can tell Foxfield is gone, Rochefield is gone and so are hundreds of other Irish towns from all over Ireland.

Those towns aren't on any modern map that I've encountered and neither are hundreds of other Irish towns that I can see on my historic map of Ireland. Maybe the locals know where they are and maybe they know what happened to them but that doesn't help you much right now. Actually I doubt many Irish know of these places except the older population and perhaps a few local historians. These "famine towns" in Ireland are what we call "ghost towns" in the states. Also, they may just be so small that they aren't shown on any map.

One other thing to note! Town names were changed just like Irish Names were. Remember the spelling you have may not match anything on a map. Refer to the first article "Is Koen an Irish name?" and apply all of that to the town names. It can get a bit frustrating at times.

But why did they disappear?

The famine devastated not only the population but also the Irish landscape. To get an incredible view of that impact I recommend a very inexpensive book called The MacMillan Atlas of Irish History edited by Sean Duffy. It's filled with graphs, maps and statistics that will enlighten you about your Irish history. Part five is titled From Splendor to Famine and it gives a rather brief overview of what happened to Ireland. It doesn't get into what happened to the towns but it does give you a historical reference for you to expound upon.

Ireland's great potato famine took place between 1846 to 1851. All over Ireland almost 1 million people died and about 1.5 million emigrated. Ireland's population dropped from 8 million to under 5 million in only five years. After the famine emigration took a massive increase. Totals on emigration from the island were near three million from 1851 up until the 1930's. That's not the end of it either. Between 1954 to 1961 Northern Ireland alone saw 72,000 emigrate and over 3100 people die in the troubles. Towns simply were abandoned over the years for one reason or another.

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