Glasson scholar named President of the Society for Names Studies in Britain and Ireland
Glasson native Dr Aengus Ó Fionnagáin, a lecturer in Irish at the University of Limerick, was recently elected President of the Society for Names Studies in Britain and Ireland (SNSBI) , for the period 2026 to 2029.
A past pupil of Tubberclair NS and the Marist College, Aengus went on to attend NUI Galway, completing an Arts degree in Irish and Geography.
After this degree, he found that there was Government funding available for a handful of scholarships on researching placenames.
Westmeath was one of the counties in which little research had been done on placenames, so Aengus successfully applied for the scholarship and started a PhD focusing on the history of townland names in two baronies near Athlone.
Having spent the best part of five years working on his PhD he decided to make researching placenames a focus of his career.
The SNSBI traces its origins back to 1960 and is a premier forum for scholars of onomastics in Britain and Ireland, with additional contributions from Scandinavia.
The aim of the society is to promote the interdisciplinary study of placenames, personal names, and other names, and all they can reveal about the diverse peoples, languages, histories, and landscapes of Britain and Ireland.
Aengus also presented a paper entitled 'The fields of Athlone: Town park and field names outside the walls’ at the spring conference of the society which was held from Friday, March 27, to Sunday, March 29, in the historic Guildhall in Bury St Edmunds.
Aengus acknowledged his attendance at the conference was supported by the AHSS Conference Presentation Funding Scheme, and the School of English, Irish, and Communication.
His paper was based on research for his forthcoming book on the placenames of Athlone and its hinterland.
A collection of late seventeenth-century maps of the town is a legacy of Athlone’s strategic and military significance at that time. These maps provide important insights into the layout of the town and its connection with the surrounding landscape.
The lands adjoining the town wall were a key component of the economic life of the town. This is reflected in the extraordinary collection of historical field names and names of town plots (over 80 names in the area adjoining the east-town alone) which survive in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century records.
Most of these names are of Irish-language origin, and with interpretation, many of their locations around the town identified. He said that analysis of these names can reveal much about the past economic life of the town, and its intersection with language, politics and the local landscape.