David at hath@tinet.ie writes: << a townland (actually on the Ordnance Survey map its spelt, wrongly, Tawny >> David, Welllllllllllll.......for 150 years, it's been spelled Tawny, in the Townland listings and on the OS maps. So I'm not sure that 'wrongly' is the exact word I'd use. Years ago, I gave up arguing with the decisions made by Griffith, O'Donovan, O'Curry et al, when they were involved with the surveying of the townlands of Ireland in the 1830/40's. Their results are reflected in the Townlands Listing used as the basis for the Seanruad website. Griffith's technique was to get lists of townlands from the high constable of each barony, he used estate maps, checked with the landowners and with the clergy. After this, he acknowledged these townlands as long as they had been accepted in the neighborhood for at least fifty years. O'Donovan and O'Curry, both well-respected Irish language scholars, continued the search for proper representation of the townlands and their names. It was essential that the Townlands Listing (and also on the six-inch maps) use English........ so a procedure was developed to anglicize the Irish names by creating English spellings whose pronunciations would produce as close as possible a match to the sound of the Irish placename. The procedures, tribulations, compromises, etc. of this endeavor is well-covered in Andrews' "A Paper Landscape - The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth-Century Ireland". This program seemed well-suited to the situation - dealing with a largely illiterate population, who had only an oral tradition of their townlands. O'Donovan chose to collect at least six versions of each townland name (from the mixed sources - landowners, clergy, residents, etc.) by which he tried to standardize the conversion to an anglicized form. With over 60,000 townlands, it's not surprising that he was a bit 'pressed for time'. And I would guess that, when he was done, he would have had trouble finding someone in any given townland who agreed with his anglicized pronunciation or his spelling. Just like today. The Tawny is related to O'Donovan's word-segment Tawn, which is apparently Tamhn in Irish (as expounded by a thoroughly non-Irish speaker - - me). He uses this consistently through all of the Tawn-xxxxxx (or Tawna-xxxxxx) townlands in the Connemara Gaeltacht, and he appears to be consistent up into Donegal. My comments on the wide variations of spelling due, primarily, to the illiteracy of the general public in Ireland in the mid-1800's - should not be construed as an insult in any way, of course. My own surname, brought to the U.S. by a 14-year old boy departing from Texel, Holland on the first of October 1636 (the original and only immigrant with the Schermerhorn name) - has appeared in at least 27 versions of wildly-different spellings.......also, undoubtedly, due to illiteracy. My Dad, a budding genealogist in college, discovered what had been happening to the family name, and went to court and had his name legally changed to the original spelling - thereby antagonizing his parents and siblings, none of whom saw the necessity for such a drastic change. What goes around, comes around. You'll notice that I didn't even touch the subject of "unofficial" townlands, whose names are acknowledged only by their residents and descendants <gr>. Pete Schermerhorn, in the glorious Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts