Ancient Westmeath.
Author: WALSH, Paul.
Lilliput Pamphlets 4. 1985. 30 pages. Illustrated. Booklet.
A description, based on earliest written records, of the county’s development and formal origins, its pre-Norman territorial divisions and kingdoms, and the dynasties that shaped it up to the time of Cromwell. By conferring ‘a local habitation and a name’ upon parish, town, hill, lake and river, Irish scholar Paul Walsh laid the foundation for a historical geography of the Midlands. This essay, published in his centenary year, is as fresh and informing as when it first appeared in 1938.
Paul Walsh (Pol Breathnach) was born in Ballinea, Mullingar, 19 June 1885, and died at Multyfarnham 18 June 1941. He was educated locally, at St Finian’s, Navan, and at Maynooth, where he was inspired by the language revival movement and devoted himself to Irish studies and in particular the history and placenames of his native county. He taught Latin at St Finian’s, Navan, and Welsh and ecclesiastical history at Maynooth College until 1928, becoming parish priest of Multyfarnham in 1932.
He wrote copiously on aspects of Irish language, topography, literature, hagiography and general history, as Fr John Brady’s bibliography (reproduced in Marian Keaney’s Westmeath Authors, Mullingar 1969, pp. 301-26) testifies. In 1940 he was elected to the board of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which in 1957 published his most enduring monument, The Placenames of Westmeath, Colm O Lochlainn also edited two volumes of his collected articles: Irish Men of Learning, Dublin 1947, and Irish Chiefs and Leaders, Dublin 1960.
ISBN: 0946640084
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