Ireland isdivided into about 64000 townlands ranging in size from a few acres to a few thousand acres. Generally the townland boundaries follow physical features of the landscape; roads, ditches, hedges, rivers and so on. In the seventeenth century the townland became the basic administrative division and outside of the actual towns and cities it is the townland name that was almost always used as the description of a persons location. The name "townland" doesn't mean any connection with a town - it has the same meaning as the Irish "baile", meaning home or the place where you live. As in most languages words often have more than one meaning and baile also has the meaning of town, which is probably the origin of the use of the English word townland. This is the Irish word that, Anglicised gives the prefix of bally, which you see in so many place names.

The use of townland names has only recently changed, thanks mainly to the efforts of the post office and the introduction of post codes as well as road names and house numbers even in rural districts, and there is still a rearguard action going on against letting the townland names fall into disuse. The names are a living description of the landscape, although with Anglicisation from the original Irish and corruption through variation in pronunciation and spelling, a lot can be hard to recognise. I think we would be immensely the poorer if they were to fall out of use and be forgotten. I'm glad to say that Queen's University in Belfast a few years ago took on a project of researching and documenting the meaning of all of the place names in the north of Ireland. They seem to be making good progress in this and have published a number of volumes to date.