Karen at [email protected] writes: << What is the difference between a "Townland" and a "Town?" >> Karen, Here's a short bit I wrote a couple of years ago for someone who was interested in Co. Limerick: ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// //////////////////////////////////////////// Regarding the difference between towns and townlands.......it's a real mess. There truly are no such things as "towns" in Ireland. There never were any before the Vikings arrived. They set up the town system. There have been efforts to legitimize towns over the centuries - giving them town councils, special voting districts, etc.. But the fact has remained that all of the land was already divided-up into townlands when the Vikings arrived. So their towns often took the same name as one of the townlands (or not), but soon the settlement spread over, and gobbled-up, other townlands as the population increased. Limerick City is all a bunch of townlands. Even the Ordnance Survey's Gazetteer of Ireland, from the 1980's, is subtitled "Names of Centres of Population and Physical Features". The term "Centre of Population" often applies only to a location with a post-office and "of being, therefore important social centres, although in terms of population they may be quite small". The Irish had a good system until the Vikings came and messed it all up <gr>. You might want to look at: >> http://www.rootsweb.com/~fianna/guide/land-div.html <<. It's a good description of land divisions. One note.....the cartographers at OSI have done a reasonable job of placing the name of each townland on their Discovery maps as close to the geographical center of the townland as possible. Remember that a square mile is 640 acres, and will cover a square on these maps about 1 1/4" on a side. You can estimate dimensions by knowing the acreage from the seanruad website, and with the additional piece of information that 90 percent (my estimate) of townland boundaries lie along the tiny blue lines of streams and brooks. Those haven't changed in centuries. ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// //////////////////////////////////////////// Pete Schermerhorn, in the glorious Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts