Join us for an evening of illustrated townlands talks along with Dr Kay Muhr, providing an insight into the history and heritage of place names along with images of maps and photos of local interest from along the shores of South Lough Neagh.

Lough Neagh Discovery Centre

Wednesday 25th May 22'

7-9pm

Kay Muhr trained in Celtic Studies at Edinburgh and Dublin, and from 1987 until 2010 was senior research fellow of the Northern Ireland Place-Name Project in Irish & Celtic Studies in Queen’s University Belfast (www.placenamesNI.org). She is also a member and former chairman of the Ulster Place-Name Society (www.ulsterplacenamesociety.org)

Kay is the author of vol. 6 in the Place-Names of Northern Ireland series (NW Down), a millennium introduction to local place-name study called Celebrating Ulster’s Townlands, and joint author (with Patrick McKay) of Lough Neagh Places: their names and origins (2007). She has also worked on Irish surnames, and in autumn 2021, with Galway colleague Liam Ó hAisibéil, published the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names of Ireland.

For Lough Neagh Places, Kay, from the fens of East Anglia, covered the early Irish origin-legends and the place-names of the southern end of the lough, while native Pat McKay covered the north. Many maps were scanned, and photographs of local places collected, which will be used to illustrate the talk.

The evening will finish with a traditional homemade eel and soda bread supper